Shadow QR codes that only work in certain sunlight

Generally I think QR codes are a lame stopgap technology. But this application by the Korean retailer Emart is fairly clever. They deployed 3D "Shadow QR codes" that only work during certain sunlight hours, lunchtime specifically. I could imagine this kinda thing being a fun clue in an alternate reality game. "In Seoul, retailer uses 3D QR codes and the sun to deliver discounts only during its quiet times" (Springwise, thanks David Steinberg!)

• [mintyy]

  So people will have to wait for a certain time of day to not scan them anyway? 

  Seems to be a gimmick that only adds to what makes them useless in the first place. 

  • [David Pescovitz]

    It’s absolutely a gimmick! That’s my point. But this is a more interesting gimmick, IMO, than plain ol’ QR codes.

  • [Ramone]

    And yet the campaign worked.

• [theophrastvs]

  ” Generally I think QR codes are a lame stopgap technology” …fair ’nuff, but what is the form of the proper technology?  not RFID surely?

  • [Dan Uznanski]

    QR codes are made for systems that can’t do OCR.  A simple OCR module on smartphones – with support from the coloring and font selection of the ad – would make it so you could transmit the information via a cleartext URI, allowing usage by people who don’t have a smartphone or who otherwise wish to note the site down for later.

    • [Matthew Petty]

      A stopgap version of that could be to use the old OCR-A font, to make it easier to begin with.
      The downside to that is that all billboards end up looking like flyers for techno clubs ca. 1992.

      I’ve seen ads in magazines that said to scan the whole page to “access content” (vom).

    • [Alex Stapleton]

      There’s an OCR App for Android (OCR Test) that hooks up Tesseract (one of the best open source OCR engines) to your phones camera. It mostly works pretty well, but it’s kind of slow and it is easily distracted by other stuff in the image so you usually have to crop the image very closely to get good registration.

      QR codes have *much* better speed and registration than OCR. One of those will be fixed by hardware improvements. The other one I’m not sure any existing algorithms are really capable of dealing with.

    • [First Last]

      Ah! So QR is a stop-gap technology to the past where we travel to web locations by typing and nobody owns a smartphone rather than the future where everyone owns a smartphone and can just point-and-go at badges/icons.

• [alfanovember]

  0:58  ”Just Deriver It”     Oh my.  I’m having a moment of cultural dissonance.

• [Giler]

  This wouldn’t work in the UK. We don’t have sunlight…

  • [Matthew Petty]

    They could a different surface, so that moisture only collects on the QR code grid. Kind of like the Guinness glass recently.

• [bardfinn]

  Some things you can do with a QR-code that you can’t do with RFIDNFC and / or OCR software:

   Create a glyph that takes up a standard shape and size. (Neither)
  Include Reed-Solomon Error Code Correction coding. (OCR – the ECC would defeat the purpose of OCR fonts / tech, which is to make the info parsable  to computers and humans alike)
  Audit the contents of what information is being transmitted – without special hardware (RFID)
  Create rubber stamps to fix to the bottom of your shoes (neither)
  Print it out, fold it up, stick it in a safety deposit box and still read it ten years later (RFID)
  Robustly survive having a coil-induction capacitative discharge flux near it (RFID)
  Not have someone come along and pencil it down on a scrap of paper (OCR).
  Not have someone come along and hack into / hijack / overpower the signal of (RFID)
  Not have someone come along and change the signal with a few easily-placed pen strokes (OCR) (Yes, someone might work out a glyph collision (think hash collision but more involved))
  They give you a binary response: Signal / No Signal — by design.

  QR Codes are also perfect for conveying encryption keys (in binary or a suitable n-bit representation standardisation; ASCII-armouring often bloats the data too much), key fingerprints, and other chunks of information that you don’t want run over a standard-formatted microwave-region radio communications link (bluetooth, NFC, WiFi, CDMA, whatever).

  • [bardfinn]

     Also, how else will we make Snow Crash references? INCONCEIVABLE

  • [nox]

    Yea, totally lame stopgap technology.

• [oasisob1]

  Those would be fun to hack to land on a site of your choosing.

• [tim mccloskey]

  Shameless plug… 4 foot QR Sculpture that uses light and shadows (any time of the day)… http://artstallations.com/qr