Comments on: Shadow QR codes that only work in certain sunlight

By: First Last

First Last — Sun, 27 May 2012 23:11:00 +0000

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.

By: tim mccloskey

tim mccloskey — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:16:00 +0000

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

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Wed, 23 May 2012 23:44:00 +0000

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

By: Alex Stapleton

Alex Stapleton — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:09:00 +0000

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.

By: nox

nox — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:24:00 +0000

Yea, totally lame stopgap technology.

By: Ramone

Ramone — Wed, 23 May 2012 18:10:00 +0000

And yet the campaign worked.

By: bardfinn

bardfinn — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:25:00 +0000

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

By: bardfinn

bardfinn — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:24:00 +0000

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).

By: Matthew Petty

Matthew Petty — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:58:00 +0000

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).

By: Matthew Petty

Matthew Petty — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:57:00 +0000

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

By: alfanovember

alfanovember — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:47:00 +0000

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

By: Giler

Giler — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:47:00 +0000

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

By: David Pescovitz

David Pescovitz — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:34:00 +0000

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

By: Dan Uznanski

Dan Uznanski — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:32:00 +0000

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.

By: theophrastvs

theophrastvs — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:25:00 +0000

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

By: mintyy

mintyy — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:20:00 +0000

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.