QR Codes

Introduction 
The world of barcodes is becoming vastly more interesting in recent times, with 2D barcodes allowing us to represent anything from URLs to invoices, which in turn allows us to connect physical images to applications in all kinds of interesting ways.

QR Codes storing addresses and URLs may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards or just about any object that a user might need information about.

A user having a camera phone equipped with the correct reader software can scan the image of the QR Code causing the phone’s browser to launch and redirect to the programmed URL.

This act of linking from physical world objects is known as a hardlink or physical world hyperlinks.

Barcodes: a brief history
Life is truly black and white when you are dealing with barcodes. Those little lines that grace the backs of our books, boxes and just about everything else have become ubiquitous in our society - so much so that they have become symbols of capitalism, namelessness and government control.

Some readers have never known a world without barcodes, and for others it may just seem like that, but the barcode is barely in its middle-age crisis.

Officially, the first patent for a barcode was awarded in October 1952 for tracking train cars. It was another 14 years before the barcode caught the eyes of manufactures and put into commercial use. Another 15+ years forward to the 1980s, and barcodes were being slapped on just about everything we buy.

A barcode is a combination of thick and thin lines used to represent a series of numbers. For books, these numbers encode an ISBN, which has become so popular it had to be extended from a 10 to a 13 digit number! But a barcode can encode any value, not just ISBNs.

The series of lines represents digits, and the thickness and combination of those lines describe which digit is being encoded.

The traditional barcodes you see everyday are sometimes called one-dimensional barcodes. This is because they are scanned, or "read", in only one direction - horizontally. The vertical height of the barcode makes for easy scanning, but in itself does not add any additional information.

The next generation of barcodes is generally referred to as 2D, two-dimensional, barcodes. These new style barcodes get their name from the ability to be read both horizontally and vertically, therefore increasing the density of information that can be encoded in the same amount of space.

QR Codes
QR codes are the most robust of the current 2D barcode formats. They have wide adoption in Asia and Oceania and are making headway in Europe and the Americas. What makes QR codes so special is that they are capable of encoding non-ASCII characters, along with URLs, telephone numbers, SMS messages and even binary data.

Created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

Since you can encode just about any data, you can begin to use it for applications such as inventory control or unique ids for database look-ups, and beyond. Below is an example of what a QR code looks like.


Example QR Code (links to http://www.cdteam.co.uk/)

You can recognize a QR code by the 3 large squares in the corners. These are registration marks - they tell the QR Code reader which side is the top.

A good scanner can read a 2D barcode from any direction and rotate it in memory so those registratiion marks and the rest of the barcode are in the right orientation. The black and white squares in the area between the registration marks are the encoded data (well, it is slightly more complex than that, because there is some error checking and correction added into those squares).

This makes the format even more robust and resistant to damage from the elements. With the highest level of encoding and error checking it is possible to damage up to 30% of the barcode and have it still be decoded into its original data.

QR codes can also encode more data than other barcode formats, over 4000 ASCII chars. The more data that gets encoded, the larger the barcode grows.

Example QR Code  (500 characters)

You can see that the dimensions have grown and there are additional, smaller, registration marks to incorporate the additional information. 

So what kind of things can we use QR’s for?
Well there’s many possibilities and you’re only limited by your imagination – here’s a few:

Example 1: Game Promotion

Imagine the gaming poster of the near future: A large 2-color poster with the game name & photo. At the bottom there is a series of 2D barcodes. The first is a link to a calendar file. You follow the link and it adds the release date into your phone's calendar so you don't forget about it and double book that evenings gaming in. Another 2D barcode is a 30 second preview video clip of the game that you can check out on your mobile. The 3rd 2D barcode links you to a site selling the game. You take a picture of the barcode and Instead of typing in your credit card number, you simply get the price of the game added to next month's phone bill and the game is delivered to your door.

Example 2: Branded products:
All physical media and content can be branded with specific QR codes. This enables the user to access further content by for example, via a mobile friendly social network site that is linked in with a specific product. You could also back trace its CSR credentials.Points in a ‘virtual clubcard’ format could be added to user accounts to be submitted for various incentives. Of course by registering and continuing to be active via this type of information exchange, gives deeper insight into specific demographic and consumer information.

Example 3: Accessibility:
Your phone is much more versatile than just accessing URLs. Your desktop web browser knows several different protocols – http, https and mailto to name a few. Your phone, on the other hand, knows about these and some others, namely the tel and sms protocols. In much the same way that you link to an email address with mailto:enquiries@cdteam.co.uk, you can link to a telephone number with tel: 01491636373. The former will launch your email client so you can send a message, and the latter will launch the dialer on the phone so you can make a call. The protocol sms:123.456.7890 works in a pretty similar fashion. Now you can begin to encode barcodes that act as links to dial out.

Example 4: Conference/Live engagement
Imagine you are at the next national gamer convention, all around are various forms of displayed artwork with QR codes on. Including people wearing the codes on specific product branded t- shirts, hats, bags etc. Visitors can scan and get straight onto information sites about featured games, obtain unique user downloadable content, enter competitions – the list is endless. Also displayed around the venue via gobo projectors are QR codes in discreet places that are linked to the latest hot game release – this here – there could be a website that allows the user to download special weapons, maps, engage on specific online tournaments, special deals on merchandise, invites to one off seminars that day at the conference, etc.

Example 5: Personal user’s artworked T shirt, incorporating a link to your twitter feed.

So what do you want to tell the world today?
While status updates may not be the most fascinating use of QR codes, Facebook’s move does reflect a bigger trend. PCWorld has more on their overall use:

The QR Codes are just a simple bridge from the Internet to the Outernet. They allow you to get Internet content about something that you are close to or looking at in the real world.

If the people I’m talking to are correct, QR Codes — or something like them — might start showing up everywhere. Especially as mobile get faster and mobile devices get easier to use (think iPad). Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but QR Codes are already quite common in Japan.

I can imagine a roomful of people wearing their QR Code T-shirts pointing their devices at each other, deciding who they want to meet, in a sort of augmented speed-dating ritual.

And don’t be surprised if you start seeing QR Codes as standard on business cards everywhere.

The biggest hurdles to adoption of 2D barcodes are not technical issues; these are solved. The next phase of their evolution is user interaction.

On the web people have learnt that underlined blue text is a link. We need similar conventions for barcodes - where does this barcode lead, is it a URL or an email, or a phone number? There are no de facto standards for interactions - we are learning as we go, testing what works and what doesn't and mapping that to user expectations. There is much more to be explored beyond the technical achievements of 2D barcodes and that is where the real interesting parts begin.

Links to download the software for your camera phone:

Iphone: Go to the app site and type in barcode reader- there are loads free and paid for. NeoReader seems to work for me.

Nokia: http://mobilecodes.nokia.com/scan.htm

I-nigma reader by 3GVision: Install via mobile browser: http://www.i-nigma.mobi/ or download to a computer and transfer it to your mobile device from http://www.i-nigma.com/

NeoReader by NeoMedia Technologies / Gavitec AG - mobile digit: Install via mobile browser: http://get.neoreader.com/

UpCode reader by UPC: Install via mobile browser: http://www.upcode.fi/ or download to a computer and transfer it to your mobile device from www.upc.fi/en/upcode/instructions/download

Semacode reader by Semacode: Install via mobile browser: http://semacode.org/ota or download to a computer and transfer it to your mobile device from http://semacode.org/software/

QuickMark reader: Download to a computer and transfer ir to your mobile device from www.quickmark.com.tw/En/basic/index.asp

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Author: Nick Watts