Layar Enters in Partnership With Telefonica I+D for Visual Search Technology

Amsterdam (ots/PRNewswire) -

Layar, the largest open platform for mobile augmented reality
(AR), today announced they entered into a strategic partnership with
Telefonica I+D for providing them with their market leading Visual
Search Technology: IRIS. Visual Search enables Layar to search
through millions of images to identify these images and correctly
augment them on the mobile phone resulting in a more intuitive user
experience.

Visual Search is a key component in the delivery of vision based
Augmented Reality services to end-users. It makes it possible for
real world objects to work as identifiers and/or hyperlinks for
augmented reality experiences. Layar is adding IRIS Visual Search
capability to their Layar Reality Browser, making it significantly
easier for users to discover relevant Augmented Reality content.

The goal of Telefonica's IRIS project is to develop a service
that provides information related to an object just by taking a
picture of it. The object needs no special packaging, tag or marker.
For this objective, Telefonica I+D has developed and patented
proprietary visual recognition technology. This technology enables
the identification of objects such as supermarket products, logos,
posters, or paintings among others. The collaboration of this project
with Layar is framed within the Open Innovation initiative of
Telefonica I+D.

David Marimon - Initiative Leader at Telefonica I+D: "When we
started our collaboration, we immediately saw the synergy that we
were building. Our visual recognition engine is a ground breaking
technology delivered to users. Empowering Layar with this technology
was a natural step."

Dirk Groten - CTO Layar: "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.
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."

About Layar

Layar is the world's leading mobile augmented reality platform
with 10 million installs, 10,000 developers and the largest content
catalogue with over 2,500 layers. The Layar application is available
on Android, iPhone, Symbian, Bada and Blackberry devices. Learn more
about Layar at http://www.layar.com.

About Telefonica

Telefonica is one of the world's largest telecommunications
network operators by market capitalisation and number of customers.
It operates in 25 countries and its customer base exceeds 295 million
globally. Telefonica has a strong foothold in Spain, Europe and Latin
America. Additional information can be found at @telefonicaid &
http://www.tid.es

ots Originaltext: Layar
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Contact:
Bernice Thijm, +31620542426, press@layar.com