QR Codes, Barcodes and Why Smartphone Users Should Care
Unless you’re a cashier or driver a delivery truck, you likely haven’t paid much attention to QR codes and barcodes. But if you own a smartphone, you will. Anyone who has ever been through a checkout line at the grocery store already knows a bit about how barcodes work. Barcodes are essentially like morse code for machines. The thickness and spacing between each bar denotes a certain digit which can be ready instantly by a scanner. For products, barcodes act like an ID tag–and once the machine knows what has been scanned, it can quickly pull up its price and other information from the store’s database.
That’s fine, dandy and not that interesting in the context of a store. But what if the scanner were your phone–and what if the database were the entire Internet?
QR Code for Cell-Phone-Plans.net
That’s essentially what code reader apps for iPhones, Android phones and other smartphones bring to the table. Using the same technology as the scanner at the library or the grocery store, you can quickly identify any item with a barcode–be it a laptop computer, a candy bar or a bottle of beer. But instead of simply pulling up the price, you can instantly access reviews, price comparisons, specifications and more. And now, with social barcode scanning apps–such as Barcode Hero–you can tap into information that is specific to you. For example, let’s say you walk into Best Buy and pick up an DVD. After scanning it with your phone, you could find out how much it costs at the store your in, how much it costs at FYE down the road, how much it costs on Amazon.com. Not only that, you can find out whether your friends already own it and whether they liked it or not.
The beauty of barcode driven cell phone apps is that the system is already in place–virtually every consumable product on the planet has one, which means that a backchannel of buzz, shopping tips and other information can immediately be tied to that item in a completely user-driven fashion.
In spite of the universality and convenience of barcodes, there’s another type of scannable code on the rise: the QR code. Aside from its considerably lesser prevalence, QR (Quick Response) codes have a few advantages over barcodes. Barcodes are one-dimensional codes–although you’ll see codes of varying heights, all of the information is stored according to the thickness of and spaces between the bars. QR codes, on the other hand, are two-dimensional, which means they can hold much more information (i.e. up to 4,296 characters of alpha-numeric text and up to 7,089 numeric characters). Currently, these QR codes are often used quite literally as hyperlinks. For example, if you scan the QR code in this post, you’ll be taken to cell-phone-plans.net. On the web, this isn’t a particularly useful function, but imagine if it were on a billboard, in a pamphlet or on a street sign. In essence, a QR code does what hyperlinks and EMBED tags do for the web, but for virtually everything in the physical world. That is, it allows a vast amount of information to be encoded into our environment.
For now, QR codes aren’t quite as applicable as barcodes. In Japan, QR codes have been used in outdoor advertising since the 90s–smartphone users could snap a shot of a QR code to learn more about the product or be taken to a page where they can buy it immediately. But the potential for QR codes is promising. QR codes could potentially embed entire applications or security keys. Imagine scanning a QR code with your smartphone at the bank to access an ATM, or downloading games to your phone simply by scanning a QR code. Or imagine a “smart fridge” that reads the QR code on every item you put inside of it and keeps a database of when your milk is going bad, how many eggs you have left and whether or not you’ve been eating too much ice cream.
While these predictions may not prove to be exactly spot on, barcodes and QR codes are poised to revolutionize the way we interact with physical items via our digital devices.
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