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

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September 20, 2011
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Layar Enters in Partnership With Telefonica I+D for Visual Search Technology

AMSTERDAM, September 20, 2011/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

Source: Layar

Bernice Thijm, +31620542426, press@layar.com

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