Science & Code

• Michael May 17, 2010

  Mobile tagging is awesome.

  Culture, General

  

  One thing you have got to love about Japan is the fact that the Japanese actually apply new technologies in real-life situations. Studying computer science I’ve seen tons of cool things which (sadly) never made it into the real-world.

  Concentrating really hard, an old orange-juice commercial comes to mind. A guy walks into a grocery store and modifies the EAN code using a felt pen, forcing the register to display “I love you ♥” instead of just “0.39DM”, which of course makes the cute female teller fall madly in love with that guy.

  Putting Romanticism and the fact that usually cool guys in leather jackets don’t know the EAN coding of uncommon ASCII characters aside, the cute cashier would of course never fall for something that involves things as uncool as EAN codes. Anyway, here, QR-codes are in heavy use. You whip out your phone, take a shot and are able to buy, browse, read-about, etc. whatever code your cellphone’s camera captured — a system called mobile tagging which is, to put it in just one word, awesome! You can encode virtually anything with these markers :)

   
   

1. Eric

   Uh yeah, I like that :)

   Comment written May 17, 2010 @ 10:49 am
2. Felix

   Cool, but why did you encode “I eat toenails”?

   Comment written May 18, 2010 @ 1:25 pm
3. Michael

   That’s a secret! And by secret I mean ‘I know it was the punchline, but I forgot what it was’.

   Comment written May 18, 2010 @ 1:36 pm