The Layar Reality Browser lets you search and explore the real world with real-time, location-aware help from your Nokia device. It does so by displaying real-time digital information on top of the real world, as seen through the camera of your Nokia device. Wherever you are, Layar can help you find restaurants, local art, houses for sale, and much, much more.

For example, to find a cafe, you can enter ‘cafe’ as a Layar search term. Then you switch Layar to camera mode. Next, while watching the screen of your Nokia device, move the device until a ‘floaticon’, a kind of floating icon, appears on the screen, indicating that you are now facing a cafe. Tap on the cafe icon, and you will get more information, including the cafe’s phone number, address, and distance from your current location.

Layard does all this by utilising your Nokia device’s camera, GPS, and compass. In fact, after launching Layar, you first wave your Nokia device in a figure-eight pattern. This calibrates the compass on your device so Layar always knows which direction you are facing.

Because Layar offers so much information, it arranges all that info into categories known as layers. Currently, more than 1,900 layers are available, and they include local restaurants, street art, VIP passes, and much more. While some layers are fairly general, others are very, very specific. For example: apartments in China, Andalusian cultural points of interest, and research stations in Antarctica. (And that is just from the A’s!)

With so many layers, Layar’s UI could have become a serious mess. How do you arrange the interface so that Layar’s many options don’t overwhelm the user?

For help, Layar’s developers recently turned to a Nokia user experience (UX) consultant. The consultation was undertaken at the same time Layar developers were porting the app to Nokia Symbian smartphones. While the developers had done some usability testing in the past, it was mostly informal. They would invite a few users to try the app while watching over their shoulders. By contrast, the Nokia UX consultant applied a rigorous set of heuristics, including consistency, ease of input, and ergonomics. The result is a UI that is easy-to-use and intuitive. To learn more about Layar’s UX consultation, check out this Forum Nokia case study.

To keep things simple, the Layar UI uses tabs. There are just four main tabs (not counting a fifth for settings and other details): Nearby, Layers, Search, and Yours.

Nearby is just what it sounds like — a list of items of local interest. Tap on any item in the list to get more information. Or tap on the camera icon on the right to launch Layar’s camera-powered function.

The Layers tab brings you to the master list of all categories. Because there are so many, rather than present you with a ginormous list, Layar gives you four ways to view them: Featured, Local, Popular, and Choose categories.

Select Featured, and you get a list of featured layers, such as Groupon, Yelp and Wikipedia. Local delivers a list of restaurants, apartments, hospitals, massage parlours, and more. Popular seems to be a list of layers that other Layar users have found useful. For example, here is my recent results from ‘streetART’, a layer that points to nearby street art…in this case, near my location in Brooklyn, New York:

Choose Categories, the fourth view, essentially bumps you up a layer to broad layer categories. These include Accommodations, Beauty & Wellness, Financial, and Nature and Parks:

Click on a category from this list, and you are brought to a more detailed list of relevant layers. For example, here’s what I recently found when I clicked on Beauty & Wellness:

All this information comes alive when you switch Layar into camera mode. Unfortunately, my test device, a Nokia N8, was unable to grab screenshots of Layar in action. But this sample, courtesy of Layar, gives you an idea of the fun. You can see several ‘floaticons’ above the information about Cafe New York:

Layar has great potential as an exploration aid, whether you’re looking for something new in your neighbourhood or getting to know a foreign city. And the Layar UI is easy to use and pretty intuitive. That said some of the information provided by Layar layers is less than perfect. For example, one restaurant search delivered a business in my neighbourhood that actually closed several years ago. This isn’t Layar’s fault, exactly, since the information was provided by a third party. But to be useful, Layar will somehow need to ensure quality control.

The Layar Reality Browser is available for free in Ovi Store.