The 15 finalists for the Layar Creation Challenge were finally announced this week. Layar is the largest open platform for mobile augmented reality and the competition is aimed at building concepts around useful and unique products using Layar Vision.

The Layar Creation Challenge will give away $55,000 in cash prizes to its 10 finalists. All in all, there were 200 entries submitted. The competition has 4 categories: magazines, books, self-publishing and the special wildcard category. The last of the four categories caters to entries that don’t fall in any of the first three, and surprisingly, it comprises one-third of the entries.

The wild category was dominated by commerce ideas highlighting ways to engage with users.  This acknowledges the growing interest in mobile commerce, which is currently being explored by other trends like mobile payments and NFC technology, amongst other location-aware, search and social capabilities.

Aside from cash prizes, the winners will be featured on Layar.com and in the public launch of Layar vision. They will be assisted in pitching their Layar Vision concept to business as well.

“We encouraged developers to think big and to come up with creative, smart business ideas with lasting value for both the user and layer publisher,” said Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Layar co-founder and General Manager.

“We were very excited to see diversity beyond publishing among the entries, including very strong concepts ranging from creative storytelling to shopping. We believe this shows augmented reality is at the stage where it can add real value to existing businesses.”

Layar Vision is an extension of the Layar platform, and its currently running on 10 million mobile devices. It enabled visual search on the mobile phone, as well as recognizing real world objects and showing digital content. The technology allows user to view and interact with digital experience by holding their phone over object such as posters, magazines and newspapers.

Layar Vision was launched back in August. It enables the mobile phone to recognize real world objects, and shows digital content on top of them.  It claims 10,000 developers and a content catalog of over 2,500 layers.  Layar also recently established a partnership with Telefonica I+D to avail of its visual search technology called IRIS.  It’s a valuable asset to Layar’s augmented reality offerings. Technology like this isn’t complete with a social twist, so the company added social features as well, adding sharing capabilities with Facebook and Twitter.