Layar, the open platform for mobile augmented reality (AR), establishes a partnership with Telefonica I+D in order to avail of its powerful visual search technology: IRIS. Visual search is a fundamental piece in vision-based Augmented Reality services. It allows for real world object to function as identifiers or hyperlinks, or both, for AR.

“Implementing Layar Vision, we immediately envisioned a solution encompassing both aspects of visual object recognition: on the one hand, a client-side technology that recognizes and tracks images instantaneously based on their feature set (fingerprint), but it’s limited to a few dozen images due to memory and processing power constraints. This we developed in-house,” says Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar.

“On the other hand, visual search technology, which is cloud-based and allows the client to recognize a specific image amongst millions of others. Iris is perfect at solving this problem. We’ve partnered with Telefonica I+D, hosting their IRIS Visual Search technology in the cloud allowing us to scale both in terms of search traffic as well as in the number of reference images.”

IRIS enables Layar to scan through millions of images to accurately identify a specific image and extend them to mobile phones.  As an addition to the Layar Reality Browser, IRIS makes discovery of relevant AR content rather straightforward and uncomplicated. The partnership is also part of Telefonica I+D’s Open Innovation Initiative.

The core objective of the IRIS project is to fashion a service offering that provides information about an object just by taking a picture of it, such as supermarket products, logos, posters, or paintings.  The result will be based solely on the image itself and not on any kind of pointer or marker.  Telefonica I+D has already developed and patented a good deal of visual technologies to build on this kind of service.

Layar’s been an early mover in AR technology, with a reported 10 million installs, 10k developers and a content catalog of over 2,500. With support for all the major mobile platforms including Symbian, Bada and BlackBerry, Layar only continues to grow its reach, coming pre-installed on several devices, from Samsung and others. Not too long ago, Layar also added gesture recognition to its platform and established a partnership with Chattanooga.