Barcodes for the rest of us – MIT News Office — Lots of potential apps are written all over this.
The new system, called Bokode, is based on a new way of encoding visual information, explains Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, who leads the lab’s Camera Culture group. Until now, there have been three approaches to communicating data optically: through ordinary imaging (using two-dimensional space), through temporal variations such as a flashing light or moving image (using the time dimension), or through variations in the wavelength of light (used in fiber-optic systems to provide multiple channels of information simultaneously through a single fiber).
With 90% of consumer cameras being point & shoots, there is no way of disabling autofocus, so no way of taking an out-of-focus picture of the bokode.
Wow. That picture of Rameesh and Ankit holding the damn thing is disturbing. Makes me want to bash their heads in.
Wow. Love this stuff/technology. My ego allows me to think I can almost understand whats going on.
Can’t any “encoding” system provide just about any kind of info desired and the point here is that bokode can do it with cheap passive tech we already carry around? Consumer camera’s may have the image capture hardware but not a one has the software–but I dig it.
this would couple very well to a tech Sony developed several years that used strobing LEDs to transmit the tag used.
looks like a simple extension of using
holographs for storage/ID.
the way it’s described here, i see it as
a fallout product from high speed ID system for military roving automated drones or [really] smart weapons…
[Duplicate comment deleted. Please don’t double post! – ed.]
The motion capture demo, is most interesting.
Aren’t there some whack jobs that think barcodes are the mark of the beast?
great! another highly abstract way of storing information….
just what we need
or more to the point, another way to force you buy a device to read the information…
capitalisam at its best… (or worst)
OK. Now I believe in witchcraft!
8
Toxic, when I first broke the news about non-optical fingerprint recognition ICs (now everywhere) I got tracts from two of my readers (EE’s, this was for Electronic Products) along with dire warnings that ubiquitous ID was the number of the beast. I do agree with them in spirit if not in letter.
It has a major disadvantage compared with traditional 1d/2d barcode – you cannot make easy (xerox / fax) copies of the them. And what about RF tags…
I’m willing to bet that what this guy is saying is really cool, however I’m a complete idiot and didn’t understand a word of it . I wish i wuz smartr.
This is the mark of the beast. I have the fingerprints of the beast to prove it. Those prints are on the inside of my anus however.
Well this will work great with my cell phone camera, crappy quality and always out of focus.
And by the way, I have a headache now from watching that video. They must have super-geeks at mit. How could you stay focused and interested long enough to come up with stuff like this.
#11 – I agree there’s a scary component. The possibilities of data collections, aggregations and profiling are disturbing to say the least.
It’s right up there with having a portable, electronic medical record flying randomly through cyberspace.
This looks like another interesting technology looking for a problem.
Rays of light coming from the new tags…
Powered tags? Seriously? RFID blows this away in every respect I can think of. John, I don’t see this coming soon to anywhere. It’s simply impractical.
Often, the most expensive words are “all you have to do is…”
For this item to work, the current version needs an internal LED or some form of glowing light. Every package on the shelf equipped with its own LED, lens, holographic data plate?
Versus: ink.
Th ink.
I am much more comfortable with data-rich bar codes than with RFIDs.
So, kudos to these guys who are working on this.
Smartalix,
The Hal Lindsey “Mark of the Beast” paranoia from Revelation is bad biblical scholarship.
However, its legitimate paranoia!
When my Christian fundamentalist friends saw the first bar code back in the 70s, they warned that we’d all be tagged some day.
Many people called them paranoid nuts but I always thought they were on to something.
Alfred…so you plop your Kodak on a tripod and you get an image of part of that matrix of optical bar codes. Now what? How do you translate the data? Take 20 photos, transfer them to a PC, and stitch them then send them to a converter?
Yeah, this is interesting and kinda cool, but powered tags of any type are a PITA and expensive. Unless the battery in the tag is going to last just a few hours you have to trigger the light somehow. That adds more complexity and more expense. They don’t demonstrate the use of a flash, I’d like to see that actually work given the precise angles involved.
“Thousands of bits”…RFID already blows that away. Handheld RFID interrogators work from any angle, longer distances, no ambient light restrictions, multiple tags at once, dirt-cheap, more data per tag—and that data can be changed remotely. This stuff is 70’s era optical barcodes with a twist.