One of our favorite use cases for Augmented Reality is artistic expression and the ability to make digital statements on top of places and things in the real world. 

Gilt City is artist John Goto’s response to the ongoing global financial crisis expressed in Augmented Reality around London’s Bank of England.

In his latest collaboration with developer Matthew Leach, Goto uses montaging techniques to show “marginal characters isolated in the bustling commercial centre” to draw attention to the widening income gap between the rich and poor.

If you launch the Gilt City layer near the statue of Wellington outside the Bank of England, you’ll see a motley cast of characters including a banker, a naked man, a bullfighter, a drug dealer and several other men of varying occupations asking for money.

As the user, you decide who to give money to and who to zap! If you choose to give money to the person, the black-and-white figure regains its color. If you choose to zap the person, the figure explodes, never to pander to you again (well, until you relaunch the layer, anyway).

Read more »

Our friends at BERG London have just launched SVK, a special limited-run graphic novella (yes, a comic book) penned by the redoubtable Warren Ellis and illustrated by the equally formidable artist Matt “D’Israeli” Brooker.

“First and foremost SVK is a modern detective story, one that Ellis describes as ‘Franz Kafka’s Bourne Identity’. It’s a story about cities, technology and surveillance, mixed with human themes of the power, corruption and lies that lurk in the data-smog of our near-future.”

Through its protagonist Thomas Woodwind, SVK weaves a tale of two realities — the black-and-white, here-and-now surface of the world, and the unspoken thoughts that exist in the ur-space between the story’s characters. The interplay of direct perception and intraception are cleverly exposed through the book’s use of a special UV printing ink that only becomes visible under ultraviolet light, for which BERG have supplied a small UV torch. In SVK, there’s the world apparent to the naked eye, and then there’s the unseen layer of meaning all around, waiting to be discovered by the well-prepared reader.

Which is where we come in: Layar has sponsored it’s first ever print ad in the pages of SVK! Given the themes of cities, technology and hidden layers of reality, and the chance to work closely on creative with the amazing BERG team, it was a natural fit. And of course, the ad itself consists of multiple layers of reality…so order your copy of SVK, fire up your UV-spectrum Special Viewing Kit, and trawl through the corruption and lies to discover the Secret Visual Knowledge within.

Augmented reality is gaining popularity in the corporate promotion and advertising space, and Layar is a common solution for many companies. One such example which just launched this week is that of Enel, Italy’s largest energy provider, and the second largest in all of Europe.

The company’s vision for 2011 is to inspire “a future built on sustainable well-being” - a dream they say has persisted throughout the years. A TV ad shows a boy in the past tossing a paper airplane into the air and through time as it eventually lands at the feet of a boy in present day.

To help with the campaign, Enel is enhancing their billboard advertisements in airports across Europe with an augmented reality experience built on Layar. The billboards feature a marker which encourages viewers to download Layar and launch the Enel layer for additional information.

You can see the same paper airplane from the ads floating around you, and can click it to watch the video on your phone. Other 3D models include videos and information about electric vehicles and the smart grid.

You can view some of the videos at Enel’s website, and the billboard ads can be found in airports in London, Pairs, Madrid, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Brussels, Bucharest and Moscow.

On your mobile device? Click here to launch the Enel layer now!

Layar has an extremely diverse community of developers creating augmented reality experiences of all shapes and sizes. To give you an idea of the different things that can be done on the Layar platform, we’ve put together a set of case studies featuring some truly unique examples.

Below are five case studies that show the flexibility and capabilities of the Layar platform and our outstanding community of developers. For each, click the “Case Study PDF” link to view the case study in full.

Layar Augmented Office - Case Study PDF
The Layar Augmented Office is an interactive 3D model that you can literally walk into and access information about the company, layer content, job openings and more.

streetARt - Case Study PDF
streetARt is an iPhone application that displays the public art, graffiti, tags and other forms of street art in your neighborhood. The third-party app uses the Layar Player to embed an Augmented Reality view, but it can also be viewed within the Layar app.

Exile on Your Street - Case Study PDF
Exile on Your Street is the official layer for The Rolling Stones, in promotion of the 2010 Exile on Main Street (Rarities Edition) album. Create and add posters in AR, listen to audio tracks, watch videos, purchase music on iTunes, and more.

The Invisible Artist - Case Study PDF
The Invisible Artist is a 3D Augmented Reality guide to 10 of London’s top contemporary art museums.

UAR - Case Study PDF
UAR (Urban Augmented Reality) displays images and 3D models of the past, future and “what might have been” for architecture in the Netherlands.

You can also find these case studies at any time on our Examples page.

Perusing London’s wide array of art museums, a personal tour guide is the ultimate way to augment your experience; so when a charming British artist dandified in a variety of custom suits appears before you at each of London’s top museums offering commentary about its history and architecture as well as a list of exhibiting artists, you find his “presence” pleasant and helpful despite his disarming lack of flesh and bone. 

As you progress from museum to museum, however, you begin to question this “invisible artist’s” motives. 

Artist and Derby University professor John Goto came up with the concept for The Invisible Artist in a period of frustration after being dropped from a gallery’s books. Ruminating over the politics of the art world, where an artist’s visibility requires the approval of a small group of “gatekeepers,” Goto began sketching the headless figures that would eventually become the 3D models in his Invisible Artist layer.

The nature of Goto’s frustration fit perfectly with Augmented Reality’s open space platform because Goto could place his art at any location—or in this case, at any museum he desired, without permission, and anyone (with the Layar app, that is) could see it. The result was a subversive layer satirizing the bureaucracy and lack of diversity of London’s contemporary art scene (notice how the list of exhibiting artists contains the same few names at every museum).

While its derisive nature is clever, the “must-see” factor in this layer is its exquisite 3D modeling. Peering through your mobile phone at these life-sized figures, you can see the shadow behind every fold in the artist’s clothing, the texture of each material, and the soft glow of London’s cloudy sky gently reflected off of each garment.

The Invisible Artist is an excellent example of what can be achieved on the Layar platform with the right combination of skills in the artistic as well as the technical fields. In order to build this layer, Goto utilized his artistic talent to create the 3D models, then colleague Matthew Leach (from whom Goto first learned about Augmented Reality) used his development skills to set up a server, place the models, and program functionality to make for the best possible user experience.

The Invisible Artist is Goto and Leach’s second layer in their Augmented Reality repertoire; their first, West End Blues, explores the history and sounds of London’s jazz and blues musicians. The two have recently become Pioneers in the Layar Partner Network, and you can look forward to more groundbreaking AR content from them in the future.