Unfortunately, and unlike a QR code, the data is not encoded in the drawing itself, which means an Internet connection is always needed. For URL sharing the Internet connection requirement is not so much of a problem (you'd always need that connection for browsing to the URL, unless it's a local or data URL), for everything else it may be.
Also, once the Meshtag service goes down or closes for good, all tags become impossible to read, which pretty much puts me off of using this for any permanent purposes. I suppose it will also have to deal with copyright infringement issues (and there would need to be a mechanism for submitting DMCA notices), but don't take my word for it. Related: it's easier to censor.
Whether these disadvantages are enough to make up for the fact that the codes can be drawn by hand, and can expire, only time can tell.
By the way, if this could be made to use squares instead of triangles, I guess it would be easier to draw on grid paper.
Very true. And I steered away from squares due to the "swastika effect". Also because the information is slightly more dense with a system based on triangles - 6 bits at a given vertex versus 4 bits.
Ha, you got me for a second. The bits aren't "stored" inside the vertex, but in the segments: It would be like saying that the space between bits "{0,1} {0,1}" contains 2 bits of information, and that we could encode more compactly by disposing bits around a circle, hence maximizing the number of bits in the center space. So given a triangular/square grid, the number of traceable segments is what matters (and that's where the ink goes too.)
I agree that triangles look a lot better than squares (to the point that the "swastika effect" is indeed a problem, even though the drawings are generated by a human, and not randomly.) However, they are also very hard to draw properly.
To recover the QR code decentralization, have you tried to encode data inside your triangular grid? You would loose the "drawable" property (due to the size), but the result would still look more interesting than the pixel junk of QR codes (and you could enforce "connectivity" for aesthetic and error correction.)
'Maxicode' uses a hexagonal pattern to encode the data - it's probably how this idea would evolve if you wanted to store the data in the pattern itself:
if that's true then it doesn't really solve anything. The other obvious issue is how people are going to remember complex shapes like that. What about using a combination of 3 basic shapes instead (triangle,square,circle).
Yet the idea is still quite interesting. The OP is definitely on something here.
I suppose you could rework this to actually encode the message in the shape much like a qr code. You could do it by having the first 9 characters be done by just moving around the 3 sides of the triangle, then the next set would have a dot in the middle, and then the next set would have a line through the middle, etc. You could then write that line-by-line or in a spiral or something.
Neat to think about though. And, unlike QR codes they look sufficiently sci-fi.
> once the Meshtag service goes down or closes for good, all tags become impossible to read
That is my concern as well. Also, what problem does meshtag solve? Why wouldn't I just use QR codes? I mean meshtag is neat and all, but seems like a novetly to me.
> Unfortunately, and unlike a QR code, the data is not encoded in the drawing itself.
Obviously, there is data in the drawing. Just that data is a symbol which is resolved through some proprietary app, which maintains the association in a private database where it is subject to expiry and such.
Just some third party has to develop an independent app to open up access to the data in the drawing and use it outside of the original system.
There might not be enough data in the drawing for it to satsify the same use cases as QR codes.
For private labeling, it could be good enough.
For private labeling, though, I'd prefer something that just scans alphanumeric labels, and not some silly triangles. I don't want to rack my brain inventing a triangle code for my Lady Diana collectible #153 that is different from those which I tacked onto 1 through 152. :)
I know this, and one can think of it as the numbers encoded in a plain old EAN-13 barcode. But as with these barcodes, the numbers by themselves don't usually have any meaning, they are just the key of a key-value pair. In this case the key-value database is in the Meshtag servers.
Like you said, the "raw numbers" can still be useful for small-scale labeling, but once you are at the point where you're just using the drawing to record a simple ID, it may be just easier to write the ID alphanumerically and have the computer OCR it or even just type it by hand (with a checksum digit, this can be more practical and effective than having to deal with camera scanners - "oh where is that app again/where did I leave my phone again...").
there could be much more data if you did a scribble, and it could translate to some specific data that could be useful (to stop by a third party number or code that doesn't mean anything by itself. is only useful to promote the cloud or to represent large amounts of data)
That is a huge problem. A better solution would have been an app which takes a url and shows a sketch of triangles or squares which the user can then write out. Such an app could work offline as well.
I'm less worried about the requirement for an internet connection than I am about the single point of failure. When the centralised service goes down, all your tags are useless squiggles.
Sure, but you have to admit that history is littered with things like this where they still died anyway. Can you not see how people could have concerns over this?
(I've commented elsewhere on this page BTW; I don't think the fact these are valid concerns makes it inherently bad ...)
> and solves a lot of the problems with QR codes. Not just the hand-drawable-ness
Who is trying to hand-draw QR codes? Why would you need/want to hand draw a QR code? The aesthetic thing for me is just a personal preference. I don't see how meshtags solve any problem that isn't already solved.
It adds one huge problem -- there is no central authority I need to rely on for QR codes. My QR codes can't get sold out from under me to someone with more money, as these can.
That's the same disadvantage with a URL. If you just wrote "whatever.com" the main problem is that you probably don't want to go to whatever.com, but some child page. But the main reason the child page isn't it's own site (like "whatever-child.com") is because you'd have to buy a new domain or go through some registration mechanism to make it act like that.
But if you're willing to pay and register, why wouldn't you just write the URL of the site you paid for and registered? Not only is it writable, but it's human readable and type-able, too...
So the big advantage is that it's probably cheaper, (and maybe splashy and fun.) And unless these get popular, nobody is going to know what it is, so you have to write "Go to www.meshtag.com and download meshtag so that you can see our message!" Which is a bit like hiding your product in someone else's store.
(But that's probably why I'm an unimaginative cynical clod.)
Have you heard of elian script? This reminds me a bit of it. Also, elian script is fairly easy to write once you get the hang of it, if you were very good at it it could be faster than the latin alphabet, as it takes less movements per character.
QR codes and such I imagine will fade as more applications support live OCR. Its only a matter of time before phones will ship with the native app using text detection to make hyperlinks clickable from the camera app. There's already text grabber and the like on iOS/Android. This seems like a stop-gap. It's cool but I just can't see using it.
It's a confusing solution for a problem that does not exist, which is how to use a pen to draw readable shapes, a problem many of us learned how to solve in elementary school.[0]
Sorry, but the problem is how to use a pen to draw machine readable shapes. Machines find reading QR codes and OP's triangles easier than reading letters.
Morse code, alpha bravo charlie, ASCII... there's actually a long history of doing this. Maybe not one meant for easy of memorization and drawing though. Even Mark Whatney had to be taught Morse code on Mars.
(Yes the phonetic alphabet is meant for ease of hearing by people, but writing a program to understand 26 distinct sounds can't be nearly as hard as natural language transcription.)
If you wrote numbers or letters as precisely as the triangles are drawn in the example, I doubt computers would have much of a problem reading them. We've got fast algorithms for digit classification that are pretty much perfect on the MNIST dataset with just 0.21% error (and I'm pretty sure there are errors in the dataset itself, which brings the real error rate down). MNIST is an easy image recognition task compared to others but it's not done with clearly written numbers.
Machine-readable codes also have space-efficient error correction built in, something that plain text does not support. A text label can become unusable with the loss of a single character.
Only if the code has no error correction built in. If the code is presented to the user to write down it's perfectly possible to have redundancy in the code.
I much prefer QR Codes as there is nothing to buy and their embedded data makes them standalone. Meshtags seem more like a graphical version of bitly or tinyurl.
A problem I see with this is recognition. A QR code can be printed onto a piece of paper with no further information attached, and even some less-techy people will know what to do with it, because it's clearly a QR code. These drawings are pretty ambiguous, and unless it catches on with the less-techy crowd you'd have to add an attached note "Go download the Meshtag app to read this!", which would probably not happen too often.
They are however, much prettier than regular QR codes. :)
This is cool, though as said in the other comments, it's unfortunate that the readability of the codes are tied to the availability of the service, like a URL shortener, i.e., not very mesh.
Did you do much research onto the actual "serialization format" of the tags? Aesthetically they are nice, but I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes for drawable-but-not-necessarily-human-readable dense formats, which is a slightly different utility function than regular written languages. I imagine there's some overlap with the psychology of memorizing passwords which are opaque semantically, but still need to be remembered.
I used Google+ so that you wouldn't need to create a user id / password. Each tag that you create is "owned" by you, and you probably wouldn't want other people to edit it (though there is an option to "unlock" a tag so that they can). It doesn't user your Google+ info, it's just for verification
For creation and updating, I can see why you would want to authenticate and authorize users, but there should should still be a way to have the app go into a read only state if all I want to do is scan.
> No. Unlike QR codes, meshtags of any color on any background can be scanned. There just needs to be enough contrast between the meshtag and its background, and the background must be a solid color.
qr codes can be any color, just need to have enough contrast, also depending on the redundancy level of it you can actually omit a significant fraction of the qr code and still have it scan
You are right. However, I think most scanners only scan dark QR codes on light backgrounds, which is not the case with Meshtag. You can draw on chalkboards, pavement, etc.
This is really neat! It does seem like it is much more prone to error than QR codes, though. Would a meshtag that is rotated 120 degrees represent the same one or a different one?
I don't really get why I'd use a Meshtag over a QR code.
Pretty much everyone has a QR reader already, whereas this requires people to download a new app (for no real gain on their part either). It also requires them to have an internet connection, which for any thing other than a URL, is really not necessary.
The problem it says it's trying to solve, making them drawable, isn't really a problem at all. I've never wanted/needed to draw a QR code, that's what we have text for.
> I don't really get why I'd use a Meshtag over a QR code.
They look cooler. QR codes are obviously computer readable nonsense. Many have complained about how ugly QR codes are. This is a nicer looking alternative.
That said, your criticisms are valid. Meshtags probably aren't going to replace QR codes, but they may inspire a nicer replacement.
As for monetization, I figured why the hell not. If somebody really wants to buy a simple meshtag that they can memorize and reuse (maybe it has their contact info), I'm not gonna stop them :). This isn't really a moneymaking scheme, this is a side project and my first Android/iOS app.
As for anonymity, it's anonymous to other users. If you deselect the anonymous checkbox when editing the tag, other users will see your name, and that's it
Please don't think I'm criticizing on your choice of monetization. Making money to continue doing what you like is a pretty big cornerstone here at HN :)
I've never in my life wanted to draw a bar code or QR.. Also I can hand-write a URL which both a human and OCR can read. So this all seems pointless.. outside of it possibly being a fun exercise to par take in.
If the problem is machine recognition of handwriting, the Graffiti alphabet is both human readable and writable and easy enough for a 32MHz 68030-ish CPU to recognize in realtime.
Graffiti is recognized by observing the strokes (direction, turns, etc) as it is drawn, with each pen lift/touch marking the characters. This is quite a different problem from doing OCR on it in a photograph, where you can (hopefully) see the shapes, but you do not know where the strokes began and ended.
Yeah, if only modern humans had a rich, widely understood, system for presenting strings of data visually, which we spend millions of dollars each year teaching everyone we can, and which is already a pre-requisite for using 95% of all online media.
"A meshtag is a "drawable barcode" that you can create
by drawing straight line segments at 6 different angles."
I count only three angles. The entire grid can be constructed via a series of parallel lines extending infinintely: one horizontal, one diagonal left, one diagonal right. There aren't any other angles.
So this is a program that can analyze an image for a structured drawing, encode it as a unique bit-stream, and translate that bit-stream into a URL.
I can very easily draw "https://goo.gl/e0aeeD" on a chalkboard. Android users could use Google Goggles to grab the text without typing it in, and paste the URL into Chrome. If I had to, I could leave off the "https://" part, and it could still work.
I get how it's easier to process the triangle-based image into a usable bit-stream than it is to do OCR, but how does that make things easier for the user?
hey, this is wonderful. it would be great if street painters adopted this to communicate with their audience. i would love to go into a tunnels with cool street paintings and scan these signs and get access to playlists, videos and messages that the painter wants us to visit. these cool triangles could become symbols of an underground movement if promoted in these communities.
"Small meshtags have lifespans that depend on their complexity. A simple tag might only last for a week, while a more complex one might last for 6 months or a year. Very complex tags will never expire. This prevents the simple tags from being used up." So the mantra is, i guess, make it complex. Also leave it to the imagination of a street painter, i am sure they will make art out of it.
I think it's a mix of QR code plus Microsoft Tag. Tag suffers from the problem of requiring an internet connection but they do provide stats on how many people scanned the tag.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadFor it to be compelling, it needs to be readable in a bunch of iOS / Android barcode scanners, though. Any plans there?
Also, once the Meshtag service goes down or closes for good, all tags become impossible to read, which pretty much puts me off of using this for any permanent purposes. I suppose it will also have to deal with copyright infringement issues (and there would need to be a mechanism for submitting DMCA notices), but don't take my word for it. Related: it's easier to censor.
Whether these disadvantages are enough to make up for the fact that the codes can be drawn by hand, and can expire, only time can tell.
By the way, if this could be made to use squares instead of triangles, I guess it would be easier to draw on grid paper.
I agree that triangles look a lot better than squares (to the point that the "swastika effect" is indeed a problem, even though the drawings are generated by a human, and not randomly.) However, they are also very hard to draw properly.
To recover the QR code decentralization, have you tried to encode data inside your triangular grid? You would loose the "drawable" property (due to the size), but the result would still look more interesting than the pixel junk of QR codes (and you could enforce "connectivity" for aesthetic and error correction.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxiCode
if that's true then it doesn't really solve anything. The other obvious issue is how people are going to remember complex shapes like that. What about using a combination of 3 basic shapes instead (triangle,square,circle).
Yet the idea is still quite interesting. The OP is definitely on something here.
Neat to think about though. And, unlike QR codes they look sufficiently sci-fi.
That is my concern as well. Also, what problem does meshtag solve? Why wouldn't I just use QR codes? I mean meshtag is neat and all, but seems like a novetly to me.
Obviously, there is data in the drawing. Just that data is a symbol which is resolved through some proprietary app, which maintains the association in a private database where it is subject to expiry and such.
Just some third party has to develop an independent app to open up access to the data in the drawing and use it outside of the original system.
There might not be enough data in the drawing for it to satsify the same use cases as QR codes.
For private labeling, it could be good enough.
For private labeling, though, I'd prefer something that just scans alphanumeric labels, and not some silly triangles. I don't want to rack my brain inventing a triangle code for my Lady Diana collectible #153 that is different from those which I tacked onto 1 through 152. :)
I know this, and one can think of it as the numbers encoded in a plain old EAN-13 barcode. But as with these barcodes, the numbers by themselves don't usually have any meaning, they are just the key of a key-value pair. In this case the key-value database is in the Meshtag servers.
Like you said, the "raw numbers" can still be useful for small-scale labeling, but once you are at the point where you're just using the drawing to record a simple ID, it may be just easier to write the ID alphanumerically and have the computer OCR it or even just type it by hand (with a checksum digit, this can be more practical and effective than having to deal with camera scanners - "oh where is that app again/where did I leave my phone again...").
Serious question...would it be something that a person could sketch out quickly by hand? Or end up being a massive diagram?
I've been reading the book "Code" where they start getting into the combinatorics side of things, but still relatively new to it.
(I've commented elsewhere on this page BTW; I don't think the fact these are valid concerns makes it inherently bad ...)
Who is trying to hand-draw QR codes? Why would you need/want to hand draw a QR code? The aesthetic thing for me is just a personal preference. I don't see how meshtags solve any problem that isn't already solved.
But if you're willing to pay and register, why wouldn't you just write the URL of the site you paid for and registered? Not only is it writable, but it's human readable and type-able, too...
So the big advantage is that it's probably cheaper, (and maybe splashy and fun.) And unless these get popular, nobody is going to know what it is, so you have to write "Go to www.meshtag.com and download meshtag so that you can see our message!" Which is a bit like hiding your product in someone else's store.
(But that's probably why I'm an unimaginative cynical clod.)
[0] http://www.auburn.edu/academic/education/reading_genie/lette...
(Yes the phonetic alphabet is meant for ease of hearing by people, but writing a program to understand 26 distinct sounds can't be nearly as hard as natural language transcription.)
MICR E13-B: http://www.micr-fonts.com/MICRfont/micrfont.html
(*British. <grin>)
Here's an example of some that were misclassified by an algorithm: http://www.concordia.ca/content/concordia/en/research/cenpar...
They are however, much prettier than regular QR codes. :)
Did you do much research onto the actual "serialization format" of the tags? Aesthetically they are nice, but I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes for drawable-but-not-necessarily-human-readable dense formats, which is a slightly different utility function than regular written languages. I imagine there's some overlap with the psychology of memorizing passwords which are opaque semantically, but still need to be remembered.
qr codes can be any color, just need to have enough contrast, also depending on the redundancy level of it you can actually omit a significant fraction of the qr code and still have it scan
You have any background on how that QR was constructed?
* Split source image into red, green, and blue channels
* Run through the halftone qr generator[0]
* Recombine resulting QR codes into an RGB image
* Average combined QR codes with the source image
I'll probably post an article walking through the process using imagemagick some time next in August.
0. http://vecg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/Projects/SmartGeometry/halftone_QR/...
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/qr-code-artworks/
http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/18/dotless-qr-codes/
Pretty much everyone has a QR reader already, whereas this requires people to download a new app (for no real gain on their part either). It also requires them to have an internet connection, which for any thing other than a URL, is really not necessary.
The problem it says it's trying to solve, making them drawable, isn't really a problem at all. I've never wanted/needed to draw a QR code, that's what we have text for.
They look cooler. QR codes are obviously computer readable nonsense. Many have complained about how ugly QR codes are. This is a nicer looking alternative.
That said, your criticisms are valid. Meshtags probably aren't going to replace QR codes, but they may inspire a nicer replacement.
[1] https://tag.microsoft.com
Your app has in-app-purchases. Please provide examples how you are monetizing this?
Also, I notice you use a G+ identity to tie all codes to, yet your pictures shows "Anonymous" as creator. Is that really anonymous, or fakenonymous?
As for anonymity, it's anonymous to other users. If you deselect the anonymous checkbox when editing the tag, other users will see your name, and that's it
I was more curious what you were charging for.
Also, you're being discussed over on https://www.reddit.com/r/occult/comments/3esa6n/drawable_alt...
You really hit it with triangles / sigils and the occult. Perhaps a pivot? Too small a market?
I can very easily draw "https://goo.gl/e0aeeD" on a chalkboard. Android users could use Google Goggles to grab the text without typing it in, and paste the URL into Chrome. If I had to, I could leave off the "https://" part, and it could still work.
I get how it's easier to process the triangle-based image into a usable bit-stream than it is to do OCR, but how does that make things easier for the user?
Connect the dots… la, la, la-la.
http://i.imgur.com/FZrXlee.png