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Red hot Augmented Reality browser Layar announced an upgrade to its service today that adds social features to the act of looking at data on top of the world around you. If you're using Layar to look through your mobile phone's camera and see real estate listings for the buildings nearby, social network messages left by your friends in a particular place or Flickr photos from the area - you can now share that data set's layer with anyone else by sending them its URL.

Layar hopes that it will eventually offer thousands of layers to view the world through and this feature will allow users to tell their friends by email, Facebook, Twitter etc. how to "see the world as I see it."

Bing Local Search has some interesting features you won't find in Google, so the prospect of seeing Bing listings appear on top of your iPhone's camera viewer when you point at a restaurant or business is intriguing. That's what forthcoming iPhone app RobotVision offers - and it displays a view of Tweets and Flickr photos published nearby wherever you are.

RobotVision is a new Augmented Reality (AR) app for the iPhone 3Gs. It's not available yet, but it will be as soon as AR apps are formally welcomed into the App Store by Apple, probably sometime next month. AR browsers "turn the world inside out" by exposing latent online information about your surroundings; there will soon be enough of them that they will compete based on user experience. RobotVision looks like it could be a good one.

Austrian augmented reality startup Wikitude announced today that it has released the 3.0 version of its software for Android handsets, fully integrating its OpenID-enabled wiki markup of physical locations around the world with a more sophisticated mobile user experience and preparing for the launch of its iPhone version. Unfortunately, the company's content-adding site, Wikitude.me, appears to have crashed already.

Wikitude is one of the most high-profile augmented reality services on the market. It's a market that's getting crowded fast, and everyone wants to know if interoperability will be a priority or if we're looking at the next browser war.

Layar, the jaw-dropping Dutch Augmented Reality browser we wrote about earlier this summer, announced today that it is now available worldwide on Android handsets. Hundreds of new data layers are available to view on top of your phone's camera viewer, from Wikipedia entries when you're looking at geographic points of interest to Trulia real estate listings that are viewable when you point your phone at homes for sale.

There's another dimension present, everywhere we go, that a growing number of technologists are working to uncover. These people aren't talking about theoretical physics or a magical world of fairies and gnomes - they're talking about information that could offer more context to traditionally physical lived experience. Augmented Reality (AR) is the phrase being used and this practice of making layers of data available on top of real world experiences could be a big one soon.

Improvements in geolocation, bandwidth, mobile devices and APIs are the foundation of this feeling that a useful Augmented Reality may be more realistic today than ever before.

I've long fantasized about being able to walk down city streets and get information on my phone about area demographics, histories of buildings I see and block-by-block news. A new Android app being talked about today makes that fantasy feel a little closer to reality.

Dutch software firm SPRXmobile will soon release an application for the Android phone that it calls "the world's first Augmented Reality browser." Called Layar, the app is a platform that makes sets of data viewable on top of the viewfinder of your mobile phone as you pan around a city and point at buildings. Real estate, banking and restaurant search companies have already created layers of information available on the platform, which is limited to use in the Netherlands for now. The demo video of the service is quite striking.