Take a Photo of this URL
My new cell phone (a SH50iS) comes with software that turns the built-in digital camera into a bar code reader. This way you can simply take a picture of a URL instead of painstakingly typing it in. Here is how it works:
Activate the camera, switch to “Bar Code Reader” mode, press “Scan”:
The contents of the bar code are correctly read as “http://blog.schubart.net“. The phone recognizes this as a URL and offers to connect to the site:
Connect to the web site using i-mode:
In this example I used a “QR Code” type bar code. There is more information about this format on my wiki.
You can generate this type of bar code online here (Japanese).
Here is the bar code I used in my example, in case you want to try it for yourself. I’m able to scan it directly from my notebook’s monitor, without having to print the bar code to paper first.
Note that the reader software runs locally on the phone. There is no need to upload a picture to some web service. Actually, it might be a nice project to build such a service for phones that have a camera but no bar code reader software…
So far, I’ve seen this technology “in the wild” only once: A bar code in an ad that was printed on a McDonald’s place mat.
According to the phone’s manual, bar codes can also be used to store ring tones and even pictures. I wonder if you can encode the picture of a bar code as a bar code? Must… Stop… Thinking… Meta… Thoughts…
PS: This PowerPoint presentation by Nick Outram outlines some interesting ideas how this technology could be used.