In the meantime, a huge base of potential users is quickly gathering critical mass as AR-ready handhelds become more widespread. According to Gartner, the US information technology researcher, 5% of the 169 million smartphones that were sold worldwide last year came equipped with GPS and compass capabilities. This means that, theoretically, AR software developers already have access to 8.45 million customers – a figure that is predicted to nudge 156 million by the end of 2010 with the proliferation of the iPhone and its rivals powered by the Android, Symbian, PalmOS and Windows operating systems.

For companies like Salzburg-based Mobilizy, whose browser is competing with Layar to become the de facto global viewing platform for all those AR apps, such exponential growth patterns open up tantalising opportunities. “We’re experiencing worldwide interest, as companies seek to experiment with this new medium for their business,” observes Mobilizy’s communications chief Christina Rittchen. “We want to spread our Wikitude World Browser and make it the first that people use to ‘browse the world’. Our aim: that ARML will be the standard for AR just HTML has become for the web.”

Layar is no less ambitious. “We take our inspiration from science fiction and we want to grow with the technology,” says Lens-FitzGerald. “We want to own the word ‘layer’.” He adds: “Maybe we’ll become the YouTube of AR.”

As of December 2009, Layar software had been installed on 850,000 phones, giving it a market share of around 10%. Extrapolating from Gartner’s predictions, Layar’s browser could feature on an additional 16 million devices within 12 months. In February, Layar announced it had raised €2.5m in venture funding from Sunstone Capital and Prime Technology Ventures and sealed a distribution deal with a major, yet-to-be-identified, handset maker. Boonstra says the company will use its new money and muscle to open up what sounds like an app store, stocked with AR content contributed by outside producers and publishers.

The deal with the handset maker, said to be in the top three in the world, will make it possible for millions more people to run AR apps as complex as Layar on their phones. “With this, Layar opens the door for mainstream business,” says the company’s chief executive Raimo van der Klein, who notes that in January the company crossed the one million user mark. Not bad for an outfit that started out with three people on 15 June 2009 and expanded outside the Netherlands six weeks later.

Bouncing around Layar’s new fifth-floor offices in a modern building in Amsterdam’s fashionable East Docklands, Lens-FitzGerald can barely contain his excitement at his surroundings, or the possibilities ahead. Physically, he looks like the actor Keifer Sutherland – although his Tiggerish demeanour could hardly be further removed from Sutherland’s impassive interrogator Jack Bauer: Lens-FitzGerald can’t stop telling you things. He is also a consummate tour guide; pointing out Layar stuff, from a framed business plan scribbled on the back of a crumbled envelope – “I love memorabilia” – to layers in development on his Google phone.

By Lens-FitzGerald’s reckoning, there are now 375 content layers and a further 1,500 in development. As an indicator of just how quickly such a figure could mushroom, the total number of iPhone apps ballooned from 1,300 just 18 months ago, to more than 170,000. Already, many of the more obvious AR applications have been explored. Among the pop-up layers of information that can by summoned up are those that point you to the nearest public transport stops, taxi ranks and ATMs, or else provide deeper insights on familiar tourist landmarks, museum exhibits and live sporting events. Wander through any neighbourhood and you can get a commentary on your immediate surroundings, complete with real estate listings, house prices, restaurant reviews, shopping attractions and crime statistics.

As with apps for the iPhone – and probably even more so with the iPad, with its appeal to professionals – AR will undoubtedly lead to a deluge of business-oriented layers. This is hardly surprising considering that the very term Augmented Reality was coined in 1992 by Tom Caudell, a Boeing engineer who used the technology to make it easier to assemble bundles of electric wire for aircraft on the factory floor.

“There will be tens of thousands of business-to-business applications,” predicts Lens-FitzGerald. “Businesses will find layers useful as different ways of viewing their own data, their own offices. Architects and real estate professionals will benefit by being able to show 3D models of buildings that have not been built yet. There is also huge potential in education. Schools, colleges, museums, art galleries, will be able to show how things will look or used to look – filling in missing pieces of pyramids and so on.”

All the layer contents have been the result of third-party developers taking advantage of Layar’s freely available tools to connect to the platform.

The decision to build its business as an open source standard for others, rather than make its money as primarily an app builder, mimics the business model of grass-roots start-ups such as Mozilla with its Firefox operating system.

Mozilla makes its money from partnering with search engines like Google that pay for each user search enquiry; the bigger the Firefox audience, the more revenues it rakes in. Layar has a similar strategy: having built the television and jump-started a few channels, it now needs an audience. As viewers increase, the more that apps will find themselves competing for attention on that small screen, and the more that layers will pay to achieve prominence.

“We are happy to have an open platform and let companies create applications to solve relevant problems,” says Lens-FitzGerald, noting that an Amsterdam start-up would not know what 3D informational layers might work in, say, Argentina or Japan. One firm successfully using layers as a business tool is Wohnmap, a Germany property rental agent.