Lewies Blog

So lately I have discovered something called QR Codes. The industry has been limited in the amount of data that a regular barcode can hold (something like 16 numbers) , and the amount of space required that a barcode needs to occupy. A few 2 dimensional barcodes have popped up and answered the call of commerce. You may have seen some of these on your UPS packages that you received over the past few years. You could go so far as to say that they look like modern hieroglyphics.

Everyone has there own standard. However, QR code appears to be something that could affect us as people directly. QR code is so widely accepted in Japan that it has integrated itself within Japans social structure. Many Japanese camera phones come with the ability to recognize QR code. You simply take your phone, point, click, and wallah! You can enter bookmarks, addresses, or start an email application with the senders email address, a brief subject and a message already typed up for you. All you have to do is send the email out after you look over the information.

I tried my hand at generating a QR code for my own website with a QR code generator. The QR code generators are limited with the size of the QR codes created since phones only go up to version 10 (out of 40). Take a look:

These codes are blown up and are usually much smaller. Both codes contain the same information. The first is for DoCoMo and reads:

MEBKM:TITLE:Lewies Blogs;URL:http://www.lewismoten.com/;;

The second is for Vodafone and reads:

Lewies Blogs http://www.lewismoten.com/

It appears that phone makers haven’t agreed on a standard on how to store the data, but they did agree on using QR Codes. There are even applications out there that will generate a hybrid QR code to support both phones, but it is much larger.

Many applications are comming out in the Japanese market. Imagine this, you are shopping in a grocery store and you spot a QR Code on a head of lettuce. You take out your phone, take a picture and see that it has not yet expired. Well hey, we can all do that now with a regular printed date – but with the code, you can store much more information or link to that information contained on a website. You could see such things as the origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer percentage, use of pestisides, herbisides and the name of the farm it was growing on. Guess what? It is already happening – in Japan.

Unfortunately, this craze that has been going on for a significant amount of time in Japan just hasn’t made it overseas to America yet. The US industry is a little worried. I have read that there are applications that allow a user to scan a code on a product in a store, and then compare prices on Amazon.com. The other problem is that RFID is just over the horizon. The US Industry may find this more beneficial to them. RFID can’t be read by cell phones and will not be visually identifiable to our society.

Along with scanning things into your mobile phones applications, there are also QR games. Events are held in a store and also some cities where special QR codes have been strategically placed. Contestants go around and take pictures of the codes to read the information contained within them.

I think there is potential for someone to create a service that will bypass the need for camera phones to be equiped with QR scanning. You see, I can already take a picture and email it to someone. What prevents a company from creating a service that will decode the QR code for me and then send an email back to my phone with the decoded content? Sure, it is much slower, but hey – I could decode these little buggers with my current phone!

For anyone who can’t wait, there is a free java program that will read the codes for you. I took a picture of these with a camera at odd angles and loaded them up. It was able to successfully decode the images.

• Visit http://www.intelcom.ru/2d/english/demo.php
  
• Download the java application for decoding QR Codes: “QR Code-demo (jar)”
• Make sure you have JAVA installed on your machine and run!

Now that you can decode QR Codes, you can head on over to a QR Code Blog where all entries are posted as QR Codes. After you decode the QR Codes, you’ll need to translate the Japanese to English. I like the post about his valentines day project where he made a QR code on White Chocolate. There are plenty of images to show you how he did it.

Tags: Barcodes, Scanning, Mobile Phones, Commerce, Codes, Encoding, QR, QR Codes

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 11:29 pm and is filed under Computers, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.