Like me, you've probably seen designs like this in the newspaper and in various advertisements. Now that I finally have a phone/camera with the capability of decoding these things, I looked them up in Wikipedia. They're called QR codes and depending on the size and complexity of the pattern they can represent from 10 numbers to 5,000 alphanumeric characters. They have error correction capabilities ranging from 7% to 40%. Think of that - almost half of the pattern could be obliterated, covered with mud, or simply missing, and you could still recreate the content.
There are a couple of apps for the iPhone (I'm using QRReader) and a dozen or so websites that allow you to create your own QR code pattern. The one I used is QR Code Generator by Delivr located at
http://delivr.com/qr-code-generator The pattern can contain website addresses, e-mailing addresses, or plain old text that may or may not be computer commands.
Scan the code here and see what you get.
Cool. You can print up stickers then put them in random places and see what happens to your readership.
ReplyDeleteI saw a blog post where they made one of these QR codes as a cross stitch and when you scanned it, it read "Home sweet home."
LOL @Natalie. So future retro.
ReplyDelete