That said, is it just me or does it seem like consumer exposure to barcodes is going to be short lived? NFC will be in every phone in the next couple of years; manufacturing and retail will close the gap completely replacing barcodes with RFID soon after that. Even my local library has done away with barcodes and just RFID tagged every book.
Have they taken the next step and made the library door theft detectors* "smart" and able to read the RFID codes and tell whether a book is checked out or not? That would make so much of a difference for Circulation/Stacks grunts at a library who spend much of their time sensitizing and desensitizing books (most of the rest of the time is spent re-shelving).
* Of course those detectors are just intended to be deterrents, but few actually stop people from walking out of a library with a non-checked book (that's what security [sometimes "information"] is for) ... and that's why we need to keep Reserve Book Rooms.
Nate Oostendorp who does open source computer vision over at ingenuitas.com pointed out that from a computer vision perspective you really want the "not so pretty" QR code since it's much easier to recognize algorithmically over on twitter http://twitter.com/#!/nateoostendorp (How do I get a link to an individual tweet? Bad Twitter! Bad!)
19 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 56.1 ms ] threadthis is like making helvetica prettier by applying a comic sans filter
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/hccb/about.aspx
Which allows some much more impressive prettification
http://tag.microsoft.com/resources/implementationguide.aspx#...
That said, is it just me or does it seem like consumer exposure to barcodes is going to be short lived? NFC will be in every phone in the next couple of years; manufacturing and retail will close the gap completely replacing barcodes with RFID soon after that. Even my local library has done away with barcodes and just RFID tagged every book.
* Of course those detectors are just intended to be deterrents, but few actually stop people from walking out of a library with a non-checked book (that's what security [sometimes "information"] is for) ... and that's why we need to keep Reserve Book Rooms.