personally i don’t expect to see this in a supermarket anytime within my lifetime, all the UPC does is point to a location in the database, so this goes overboard (plus if there is a problem with either the scanner or the “bokode” then the cashier needs a way to put it in manually) this is all assuming i understand this LED barcode idea right

I don’t quite see it replacing barcodes but it does have some pretty remarkable properties. The positional information is the bunny for me. this is a lens effect and you see a spectrum of info based on position giving you back your own position. this is fairly useful, although as napalm said not as versatile as ar tags. After some experimentation i found that the effect could be replicated with a lens out of a cameraphone and a standard digital camera. the only hurdle in making it repeatable is finding an accessible source for microprinting.

now that cameras are becoming pretty disposable it’s not absurd to have a second camera tacked on to a device scanning for bokodes, it just doesn’t seem likely in the near future.

this is fairly restarted. once again they’ve taken something that already exists (see the wireless power post) that we’ve known about for quite some time and tried to ‘re-invent’ it.

Using the Fourier-transform properties of a lens is all well and good, but your system resolution is now limited by the dpi of the printing. most off-the-shelf printers don’t have high enough resolution to allow the resulting ‘image’ to contain more than a small amount of data.

Good to see Raskar and his team still coming up with interesting ideas.

According to the paper, they used feature sizes as big as 15um, which amounts to 1600 DPI printing resolution (a rough calculation). Commercial printers are not too far off. And if equipment is made for bokoding purposes, attaining higher DPI shouldn’t be a huge technical challenge.

Also bokodes do not have to be illuminated by LEDs, the can be made highly reflective; my guess is you could achieve the same effect with flash photography.

Don’t mix foot and meters please. SI units all the way, baby.

wow this will make an excellent addition to arduino’s and twitter. Picture it scan the barcode, which in turn tells twitter it’s been scanned which in turn tells the arduino to flash some mad crazy lights.

I know I’m going to be shouted down, but I can totally see this replacing current generation barcodes in the next couple years (my gut instinct says “20 years” but I suspect it might be sooner than that). all it takes is for somebody to be able to go in and point their camera phone or PDA at an aisle and have it be able to read all the prices, item names, and descriptions, and further be able to tag images and keep that data either on a phone or upload it to a server somewhere (eg, email it as a ‘wish list’) and everybody’s going to want to be on this boat.

@neckbeard
I hope that was sarcasm I was picking up there. the arduino has largely prompted “hackers” to become lazy in their ideas, and use something that really doesn’t properly fit the job to which it’s assigned. and aside from a few cases, mostly news and celebrities that people actually care about, twitter’s one of the most useless creations of our age. I really don’t care to read tweets every time mr. muffins uses his litter box.

This is a repost from a few weeks ago isn’t it?
Interesting technology nonetheless.

@mik no this isn’t a repost, this is more of an addon to that post

Effective magnification is proportional to the aperture size. TFP (paper) says essentially that the tiny aperture cameras on cell phones don’t work. Seems like that rules out the most interesting appilcations…

@ghrayfahx

Props mate. I got flamed the other day for commenting on a post that used microchip products as an example in a how-to (you know, the microprocessors that use *real* C and started all this ‘hacking’). good to see that I’m not the *only* one who still believes that ‘easy’ is *not* the way to ‘new and better’

@incognito53 – making this ‘more better’ as you so eloquently suggested, is not innovation. it may be an improvement of an old concept, but as you have read here, companies (and the world in general) are not about to re-invest millions of dollars to replace a system that already works (if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it). you see, the world *revolves* around money. that’s why rfid is still years away from being viable in supermarkets because it’s still *cheaper* to print a barcode on a package (which costs fractions of a cent). mind you, the same cannot be said for the shipping container industry, but that’s an entirely different story.

don’t get me wrong, this is an interesting idea. I do research in optics every day (though a good deal more complicated and theoretical than this), however there has been a rash of ideas / projects (i.e. wireless power) that have tried to ‘re-invent the wheel’ and claim it’s a ‘new’ idea.

@ghrayfahx was right. we’re getting (terribly) lazy. i find it disheartening that it doesn’t take much to ‘impress’ these days.

@ghrayfahx

I was indeed being sarcastic, if you look through a previous few posts on “arduino-a-day” you will find I indeed have been flaming the sites authors.

@Unkowotabenasai
Good point, it’s a mistake to mix in a post like that and best to stick to SI units, especially since they started with meters anyway

woow great post thanks

Its amazing seeing the difference in people, there are those with absolutely no vision that base the use of technology on what is presented initially and then there are those that have imagination that when presented with an idea immediately think of ways to implement it.

thank god no everyone is like the later or we would progress really slowly as a race.