Barcodes for the rest of us – MIT News Office — Lots of potential apps are written all over this.
The new system, called Bokode, is based on a new way of encoding visual information, explains Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, who leads the lab’s Camera Culture group. Until now, there have been three approaches to communicating data optically: through ordinary imaging (using two-dimensional space), through temporal variations such as a flashing light or moving image (using the time dimension), or through variations in the wavelength of light (used in fiber-optic systems to provide multiple channels of information simultaneously through a single fiber).
Often, the most expensive words are “all you have to do is…”
For this item to work, the current version needs an internal LED or some form of glowing light. Every package on the shelf equipped with its own LED, lens, holographic data plate?
Versus: ink.
Th ink.
I am much more comfortable with data-rich bar codes than with RFIDs.
So, kudos to these guys who are working on this.
Smartalix,
The Hal Lindsey “Mark of the Beast” paranoia from Revelation is bad biblical scholarship.
However, its legitimate paranoia!
When my Christian fundamentalist friends saw the first bar code back in the 70s, they warned that we’d all be tagged some day.
Many people called them paranoid nuts but I always thought they were on to something.
Alfred…so you plop your Kodak on a tripod and you get an image of part of that matrix of optical bar codes. Now what? How do you translate the data? Take 20 photos, transfer them to a PC, and stitch them then send them to a converter?
Yeah, this is interesting and kinda cool, but powered tags of any type are a PITA and expensive. Unless the battery in the tag is going to last just a few hours you have to trigger the light somehow. That adds more complexity and more expense. They don’t demonstrate the use of a flash, I’d like to see that actually work given the precise angles involved.
“Thousands of bits”…RFID already blows that away. Handheld RFID interrogators work from any angle, longer distances, no ambient light restrictions, multiple tags at once, dirt-cheap, more data per tag—and that data can be changed remotely. This stuff is 70′s era optical barcodes with a twist.