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  • it is sort of sad to see that so many people in the bar code space seem to see the “scan product codes and compare prices” as the only use case they can come up with. it is good from the research point of view, though, because the whole space of scenarios beyond that really simplistic world view is still open for exploration and development.

    however, as long as all they do is scan UPC codes, maybe the only use case indeed is to look up products and just pull in prices from some set of shopping-oriented web services. but i do hope that this advanced scanning will also be applied to the more interesting use case of 2D codes so that we can encode URIs, which will open up a new world of high-performance scanning of web identifiers to advance the web of things.

  • Totally agree with you, there is still so much space for exploring more than “scan product, compare price”. I know that in their “research lab” they actually exploring a lot of different and more advanced applications, I guess they mainly wanted to bring out something that speaks to everybody.

    Well actually, indeed, for the WoT we need URLs in barcodes and I know from good sources that they will include 2D barcodes soon. Actually scanning 2D barcodes is a much simpler task than 1D (thanks to the markers 2D barcodes have) so they can use the same technology without any major changes (their SDK might do that already, but I would need to check).

    Having said that, it is apparently also possible to encode small URLs (bit.ly like) in 1D barcodes which is pretty nice as well. Of course then they are not standard UPC codes anymore but they could potentially be printed using the exact same printers as for the UPC codes!