Hoppala together with our North-American partner Winvolve developed the world’s first animated 3D layer for Quiznos. Quiznos is one of the premier quick service restaurant chains in the U.S. and pioneer of the toasted sandwich.

Find restaurant locations, enjoy mobile video and discover promotional animated 3D objects at various U.S. landmarks like the New York Stock Exchange bull, the Yankee stadium or the Hollywood sign. Get a reduction on your next meal with mobile coupons.

The Quiznos layer runs on Hoppala layer server technology.

Germanys number one yellow pages “Gelbe Seiten” launched their first augmented reality service using Layar. The “Gelbe Seiten” yellow pages are published by 16 german Gelbe Seiten publishers and DeTeMedien GmbH, a subsidiary of the Deutsche Telekom Group.

The “Gelbe Seiten” layer was developed by Hoppala, one of the layer development pioneers from Germany. Hoppala did the complete layer setup, design and development. We linked the layer to the existing Gelbe Seiten database and created additional mobile web pages for every Gelbe Seiten item to show detailed information like opening times, ratings or fotos. Hoppala can offer all these services combined. That significantly reduces communication overhead, speeds up development and makes project management very easy for our customer.

When you work closely with a brand like Gelbe Seiten, you really need to take care about every detail. Therefore we pulled together all the requirements first and created a layer concept in very close cooperation with Gelbe Seiten. Having experience with layer development for a long time now helped a lot to forsee potential pitfalls and to suggest options.

There were basically two major challenges: one was to design the layer as close to the Gelbe Seiten corporate identity as possible. And secondly we needed to hook up the Gelbe Seiten layer with the existing Gelbe Seiten database, which is a huge system. Together we pulled it off, it was great to work for Gelbe Seiten Deutschland!

The organizers of the 9th 2bAHEAD ThinkTank beautifully decorated this wonderful gardens of Schloss Oelber with loosely distributed elegant tables inviting for vision talk with some coffee on a sunny early summer day. The general theme “How will we live and work in the year 2020?” inspired for open minds and profound discussions.

I had the great honour to talk about “Life in Augmented Realities – Entering the DATA Economy” together with Dale Herigstad, Chief Creative Officer at Schematic, Xavier Bringué, Vice President IPTV and Digital Home at Orange France Telecom Group and Carsten Kraus, CEO at Omikron.

Dale Herigstad, who became very famous for his work on the futuristic screens in the movie “Minority Report” presented fascinating showcases about gesture and mind control interfaces. And the “Berlin Wall 3D” for Layar initiated a very active discussion about the future of mobile augmented reality. The panelists and most attendees agreed on our thesis about augmented reality becoming the emerging mass medium of the upcoming mobile age.

Part of the event was the nomination of Layar as the winner of the “Autovision Innovations Award” for the most innovative game changing business idea of the last 12 months. According to the jury Layar stands out due to its innovative approach and game changing potential in the mobile augmented reality industry.

We’re very honored to receive this award on behalf of Layar. It’s great to see that AutoVision and the jury shares our common vision of an open platform for mobile augmented reality. The whole Layar team did an amazing job the last couple months and created a great product.

2bAHEAD Think Tank was sponsored by AutoVision, the HR and innovations subsidiary of Volkswagen.

How can I get “Hoppala goes Easter”?

We’re very happy about “Hoppala goes Easter” being featured globally by Layar. Just launch the Layar app on your phone, go to featured tab and choose “Hoppala goes Easter”. No need to download anything, you’re ready to play. Or you can use layer search, e.g. search for “hoppala”.

How does it work?

Using “Hoppala goes Easter” is very easy. Just use your phone to look around. Found some eggs? Great! Walk around them and enjoy mobile augmented reality in 3D! Want to place eggs yourselfs? Use the bunnies, they’re all around you at any time. Click them and follow the egg wizard. Note: please be nice to our bunnies, they’re shy. Want to place eggs somewhere else? Use the egg wizard on the web at www.hoppala.eu.

Is there a Log-in required?

No, there is no Log-in required. Playing with “Hoppala goes Easter” is as easy as it can be. No registration, no account approval, no fees. “Hoppala goes Easter” is free and available for everybody – worldwide.

How did you get the idea?

We are at the beginning of something very new. We’re right at the dawn of that new medium called augmented reality. It is an experience medium. It’s so great beause of three things: It combines the real and the virtual, it’s interactive and realtime, and it’s 3D. This is what “Hoppala goes Easter” is about. It combines the real and the virtual – place eggs at your friends place, it’s just that they’re augments. It’s interactive and realtime – place eggs right from your phone, right where you are, and they’re instantly there. And it’s 3D – walk around our exclusively designed eggs and enjoy mobile augmented reality in 3D. “Hoppala goes Easter” shows you what can be done already as of today – and it’s lots of fun!

Does it “pay of” to build a layer for just a weekend?

“Hoppala goes Easter” runs on top of “Hoppala Layerserver”, a cloud based POI hosting service. Using “Hoppala Layerserver” makes hosting POI services really easy. Learn more about Hoppala Layerserver.

We only need to feed Hoppala with your data. Hoppala Layerserver supports live coupling with your existing IT infrastructure, but also data upload from a variety of different sources. There are a couple of already supported input formats like CSV, XML and also Excel, Google Maps RSS feed, individual HTML parsing and SixCMS Content Management System interface. More will be added in the future.

By now the layers “Layar meets Qype” and “Stuttgart Region Clusters” run on Hoppala Layerserver.

Hoppala Layerserver sounds interesting to you? Please don’t hesitate to contact me, i’m happy to hear about your layer idea and to support you on publication.

Layar meets Qype

Qype.com is the leading recommendation portal in Germany, Great Britain and France. “Layar meets Qype” now brings Qype recommendations of restaurants, bars and events onto your mobile phone. Using the Layar Reality Browser your phone’s camera display is turned into a local information and recommendation portal.

Imagine being on vacation in an unknown city, looking for a good restaurant in the area. Just use the camera in your mobile phone to view the area around you, and immediately you see all the local recommendations of the Qype community merged into your camera’s display. Small information widgets tell you details about distance, direction and rating, including thumbnail photos for a quick first glimpse. You can easily browse through all the community recommendations on your handset with just one click.

Learn more about “Layar meets Qype”.

Stuttgart Region Clusters

Stuttgart Region Clusters visualizes various industry clusters in the Stuttgart Region, South Germany. It was designed and created in cooperation with the Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corporation. It’s mostly used for marketing purpose.

Using Stuttgart Region Clusters on a Layar equipped mobile phone provides a totally new user experience on industry cluster representation, best done from an exposed view point. Therefore I went up the Stuttgart TV tower to show the power of AR industry cluster visualization from 150 meters above the city rooftops. Learn more about the TV tower experiment.

Augmented Reality

The Layar Reality Browser is a so-called “augmented reality browser” (AR browser) which overlays your mobile phone’s live video stream with digital data in a local context. Data access can be provided using the Layar API which connects your own database to the Layar service using web service technology.

Hoppala is one of the first 50 members of the Layar Beta Developer Program. We are working closely together with Layar to integrate more external data services, and the Hoppala team is helping other content providers to make more location-based content available online.

You also want to publish geodata to Layar Reality Browser? Please feel free to contact me to help you on developing your own layer webservice.