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Researchers Debut Barcode Replacement
eldavojohn writes "MIT Researchers have unveiled a new potential replacement for barcodes. Using an LED covered with a tiny mask and a lens, these new bokodes can be processed by a standard mobile phone camera and can encode thousands of times more information than your average barcode. New applications are being dreamed up by the team. Dr. Mohan of MIT said, 'Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is.'"
I doubt libraries will go for something with a limited shelf life due to dead batteries! Might work for a box of cereal, but not for War and Peace!!
Sounds about as useful as a CueCat.
Nobody is in a library with 20 shelves in front of them. Computers do it better.
the cost per bokcode is like 20x-200x that of printing a barcode.
The concept drawings of the kids in classroom and crowd gaming looks like all the kids are tokin' it up... Sounds like a great new technology whether it's a barcode replacement or something much more.
"Currently, the tags are expensive to produce - around $5 (£3) each. This is, in part, because the early prototypes require a lens and a powered LED. However, the researchers believe the technology could be refined so that tags were reflective and require no power. "We already have prototypes which are completely passive," said Dr Mohan. In this form, they could cost around 5 cents each, he added. "
If thats true, maybe they do have potential.
Oh yay. Lets fill our landfills with more useless crap. Why the hell do I need LED's and battery is PACKAGING? They go into the trash! We as a society are trying to move towards LESS PACKAGING and recyclable packaging not MORE packaging. Is the consumer expected to rip out that LED and battery and recycle that separate for ever single ceral box they purchase?
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Looking for books on shelves in libraries as a practical use for the latest technology?
If printing the code isn't effectively free, and a device to read it is more than $5, its not a replacement for bar codes.
For great justice.
Potential, but even at 5 cents each, they won't replace the bar code, nor should it really. It may replace the bar code for specific applications, but you're not going to convince frito lay that they need to plop one of these suckers on the millions bags of chips they crank out each day.
Don't get me wrong. The technology is interesting, albeit limited to battery life. But the images in the article look a lot like a series of datamatrix barcodes. These are already widely used in many industries.
As a barcode replacement it sucks. However, the motion capture aspects looked pretty good. Using infrared would improve it as well since the camera can pick it up, but your eye would never notice it.
I think they mean this as more a QRcode type replacement, where people use them for scanning stuff on business cards or billboards, etc., not UPCs on packaging.
You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is.
...Somewhere on the shelf.
I traded all my mod points for these magic beans.
'Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is.'
Gosh, that problem has never been approached before! That's a fabulous idea!
I would think RFID would be much better for the given example of a library. To expect the book spines to be completely visible would be a stretch.
FTFBBCA: "However, the researchers believe the technology could be refined so that tags were reflective and require no power. "We already have prototypes which are completely passive," said Dr Mohan."
If it is able to hold so much information, why not get the whole book and not just the location? Well, with the books I read that should not be a problem. They are about 8 pages, made of chewable non-toxid cardboard.
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New applications are being dreamed up by the team.
If you have to "dream up new applications" for your brilliant new idea, it's not much of an idea. In fact, if the application(s) aren't obvious, and in fact, the inpriation for the idea, it's a stupid idea.
I suggest you RTFA before commenting on it:
"We already have prototypes which are completely passive," said Dr Mohan. In this form, they could cost around 5 cents each, he added.
What is a library?
Because its much more difficult to modify or remotely delete a paper book without the "owners" knowledge or permission?
RTFA. They already have a passive prototype.
Beyond that, I agree with your sentiment.
Can a modmin please edit the summary to include the passive bokodes that DON'T need batteries? About half of the repliers to this thread DNWtFV*, and missed that bit.
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Could a device the size of a cel-phone effectively triangulate the location of an RFID tag? The proposed device wouldn't work well in a library, but I don't see RFID as very useful either. If you have to walk your reader past every book you might as well just read the spines.
Something like the equivalent of RFID power. I know, shine a flashlight on it!
Besides, do we REALLY need all that information on a library book spine? A bar code big enough so an entire shelf or large section of a shelf can be seen on a cell phone camera yet dense enough to contain the library's per-item unique identifier is all you need. Bonus if your camera is wide-angle and can capture an entire wall of shelves and still resolve the bar-codes.
I'm not saying this technology isn't useful, only that its drawbacks, most notably power and non-flatness, limit the applications where it beats out bar-codes.
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Woah woah woah. Since when did we start RTFA on slashdot? Is there a committee meeting I missed or something?
http://gettag.mobi/ and it doesn't require LED's
What if you could modulate the power of your reader? Use a 10-foot setting while you're walking past the cases, a 2 foot setting to find the right shelf, and a 6 inch setting ot find the right area on the shelf?
A bar code can be somewhat dirty or damaged and still work. I'm thinking that the first time some snotty-nosed little kid walks into the children's section of the library, he'll probably wipe out the ability of dozens of books to be scanned with his mucus-mist.
It seems to me that even a small obstruction, dust, or damage to the led lens would wipe out a lot of the displable data of this led device.
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Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Mmmm, my cell phone (android) has been able to read barcodes for quite some time now... why exactly do they feel that you need to have a special barcode for that?
5 cents is still too much for something that replaces a barcode (which means it goes on everything).
For example, they could be used to encode nutritional information or pricing offers.
"One to the side may say 'hey, look at me, I'm a dollar cheaper'," said Dr Mohan.
Why exactly would a manufacturer want to put this on their products? Why would a store want to have this on their shelves? No store owner is going to want people in their store, looking at their fancy barcodes, and finding out that something else is cheaper, or worse, the store across the street has the same thing for less.
"Don't you know the Dewey Decimal System?!?!?!?!", Conan The Librarian
Yes, I know they have a prototype unpowered version
So the current powered version has all the disadvantages of being powered coupled with all the disadvantages of traditional barcodes (you need a line-of-sight). Passive RFID tags need no battery and need no line-of-sight to the tag, although their range is limited.
it's for advertising. If that isn't obvious to somebody who saw the top-most picture in the project page, then they need to think inside the box more.
Nobody's going to use this for barcodes-as-we-know-them.
They *might* replace something like a QR code encoding lots of information (rather than effectively a link to more information), but for almost anything worth describing, it's worth putting it there in plaintext.
( what, I'm going to go to a museum of modern art, and 'admire' a sculpture from 20 yards away just because the bokode can be read from that distance? I think not. )
No, this is gonna be for advertising. Imagine you're taking some casual pictures of some friends in a night out in town. You just snap the shots, come home, and whoa - the entire out-of-focus background is laden with Coca~Cola, McDonald's, Ford and whatnot logos and other texts.
The beauty of it is that they could combine it with existing light-based advertising displays. Every LED in the matrix displays at Times Square could easily have this bokode applied so that even if somebody's taking a picture of a competitor's matrix display making yours out of focus - yours will still stand out.
( I sure -hope- this won't actually be the case, but you know them wiley advertising people. )
Seriously, there's nothing new here. There's plenty of new bar-code replacement scheme that has surfaced even in the past few years, including one that will fade the barcode after the milk past its expiration date. Same application has been discussed in various bar-code replacements, including (and especially) RFID technology to include more information about the product on the RFID as well. So what is new here? a package including an LED, lense, and a battery pack?
Don't get me wrong, the research itself gives a new idea of diong things. It may be more suitable for other applications. As far as bar-code replacement goes this idea has zero application that is not already thought of. But research wise, I would give the research team credit to their creativity to come up with a different way of doing the same thing.
"Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is."
Dewey Decimal System already does that.
Are books ever where they're supposed to be?
This shit is about as useful as barcode scanners for home use. We already have 2D barcodes if we need more information. All this will be used for is advertising.
I can't believe it's taken so long to come up with a solution to for finding books in libraries. Maybe they can even find a way to extend this to allow online searches for books.
RFID is very appropriate for this. It's short range... you just need to walk your reader by the stack it will tell you if it's there or not. That is, it's a heuristic that tells you whether you need to bother looking closer, which presumably would save time.
Also, the reader + database could tell you if you are near a book which is in the wrong place, and which book it is. Then you look closer, pull the problem book for re-shelving.
I would expect to have the phone interface with the library card system, which in turn (in addition to giving you the standard Dewey filing info) would interface to the libraries shelving RFID readers.
the people at MIT do not have to remember a new word for the technology that replaces barcodes, because the new word, bokode, is pronounced the same way in New England.
/baaaa code/
Notice that the summary suggested "Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is." It didn't say "You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where you left your Fritos."
You mention the Dewey Decimal System, while also linking to the Library of Congress, which uses its own numbering and classification system.
In fact, most academic libraries prefer the LOC's system over Dewey's.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Read their paper. It is very cool! It isn't a photograph but seems to be using micro lenses positioned a focal length away from their matrix of matrix codes, to define a kind of light field where you can acquire information at arbitrary magnification by stepping farther away from the object. Limited only by your camera's resolution I suppose. They even have a prototype lens array based on ANTARCTIC KRILL eye which looks like a bulging disc shaped eye covering 180 degrees horizontally and a good number of degrees up and down too. I'd like to know just how much info can be stored, you could store tons of info on a single surface and scan it with your mobile phone. Of course, can't really think of a good use for it since most people just shoot a photo of the QR code on a poster and go to the web site... if anything the ease of use of the app on the phone, and ease of acquiring the image, are the main issues. So the guy's (bbc video) suggestion that qr codes are unseemly is silly. The point is you can acquire the code from far away and without trying hard to position it in the screen, if I understand correctly. Might be able to boost info density by using a hologram and laser to interogate it though I'd think.. any optical engineer care to say?
We already have Semacode, which can be read by phones with cameras. Semacode encodes an URL. The URL can point to something that can hold potentially an infinite amount of data. Since most phones these days have Internet access, Semacode is all you need.
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Somebody should tell these guys there's a thing called Kindle. Are you sure they are MIT??
Fine, library being on the budget that a library is won't be convinced that the minor convenience of locating a book's physical location (unless the LED is blocked, dead, etc) is worth the expense. Granted libraries already do add their own tracking system to their books. Perhaps if it could be bundled into the security device then libraries that use those could potentially do this. Of course, if it can get down to 1 cent per device in mass production, that would take this issue off the table.
Replacing barcodes and QR codes with this for everything would be absurd. However, there are many uses where a technology such as this would be a huge benefit. I don't understand the ridiculous overreactions people are having here. If the return isn't worth the cost for certain uses, then obviously it won't be implemented for those uses (at least not for long). In other cases, it will be used and could offer capabilities we haven't even thought of yet. Kind of like the inventors of the personal computer probably didn't foresee us having this discussion on a forum such as this.
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Besides, in a properly organized library finding a particular book is very, very easy, as long as you know the signature and the book is at its proper place. Might be quite handy for spotting those misplaced books, though.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
Even better, you can use a probabilistic sensor model and incrementally refine your position estimate of the RFID tag based on tag detection rates. If you're genuinely interested, look at this paper.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
"However, the researchers believe the technology could be refined so that tags were reflective and require no power. "
However; with the problem stated in the article wouldn't the rise in augmented reality applications solve the problem of being in front of 20 book shelves and not knowing where your book is?
a package including an LED, lense, and a battery pack?
They've been looking into a scheme using a retroreflector so you can illuminate the code with a camera flash.
No, this is gonna be for advertising. Imagine you're taking some casual pictures of some friends in a night out in town. You just snap the shots, come home, and whoa - the entire out-of-focus background is laden with Coca~Cola, McDonald's, Ford and whatnot logos and other texts.
Wha? How exactly would that happen unless you're using some ad-driven application sponsored by Coca-Cola McDonald's and Ford that alters your image to highlight their products?
The beauty of it is that they could combine it with existing light-based advertising displays. Every LED in the matrix displays at Times Square could easily have this bokode applied so that even if somebody's taking a picture of a competitor's matrix display making yours out of focus - yours will still stand out.
( I sure -hope- this won't actually be the case, but you know them wiley advertising people. )
I don't think anyone is going to be altering your images in any way. Unless you deliberately use software to read these images and perform certain types of operations based on that information, then you'll still just have a regular old picture.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Disclaimer: I am one of the authors of the paper.
The story title and summary are a little unfortunate. We do not imagine the Bokode to replace traditional barcodes anytime soon. However, the real strength of the Bokode are:
- you get extremely accurate pose estimation of the camera relative to the Bokode. This means that the camera knows its position relative to the Bokode. This is something a standard barcode just does not provide. This opens up interesting applications in the areas of augmented reality, motion capture, and human-computer interaction (such as multiple people interacting with a large display from a distance).
- they are nearly imperceptible to humans, yet can be read by a standard camera. Unlike RFIDs, you don't need to carry an RFID reader. You can read them with a standard camera, or even by looking into them with your eye really close to the Bokode.
- We are actively working on completely passive and flat bokode prototypes, and have some results with passive bokodes in the paper.
It's like QRcode. It's just worse, more polluting and not already-in-use.
For the record, every LED in the matrix displays at Times Square couldn't easily have anything applied, at least not more than once. I used to work in the factory that made most of those signs. Maybe they could implement something up in electrical assembly that could spray something on once, when the display mods are being produced, but A) there'd be no point, since you couldn't change it or resell that ad space, B) it would reduce the intensity of each LED, and C) it would likely reduce the overall lifespan of each LED. It was common enough to have to rub off potting material from the tips of the LEDs, I don't even want to imagine the hurdles involved in something like that. Besides all of which, the whole idea with the development of those displays is to make each LED smaller, to increase the sign resolution, which is going to make it even more impossible to cram any information in.
Don't worry they must be new here. They're right though we do have completely passive encoded information tags. They're called "Bar Codes". :0)
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The advantages of this are questionable over what we already have.
What we need is the ability to stand in the doorway of library or a warehouse and know where something is relative to your current position. Kind of like how google maps works. We need to be able to not just index but locate, and do it in such a way that dead batteries are not an issue. Perhaps some sort of radioactive isotope or something. Something that later as things get automated more, a machine can easily locate. We don't want to just identify it after we have found it, we want to always be able to locate it. We basically want small GPS systems for boxes, that also broadcast other information.
How about we start using IPV6 addresses for barcodes now?
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What about replacing the Wii pointer with one of these $5 devices (device needs to contain an 2D array of bar codes). One $20 camera could track many devices. May not make sense for 1 or 2 users. But for half a dozen uses this approach is most likely cheaper! And if you used 2 cameras you could probably localize the player in 3 dimensions along with the direction the $5 dollar device is pointing. (Can not believe this does not show up at the top of one of these discussion threads.)
I'm sure somebody could make a RFID version of kismet, if they haven't already. But yah, it'd only be helpful if the book was misfiled, otherwise just look at the section labels on the shelves.
Where it would actually be useful is in shipping containers/pallets, but only if you really needed to find something without sorting through the whole load.
I had figured you'd take a picture of some centralized bokode and it would contain enough information to give you the location of any book in the library (much like you might walk up to a map/directory kiosk at the mall). After all, a cell phone camera wouldn't have the resolution necessary to clearly see the spine of every book in the library, even if they were all within eyesight.
Then again...we already have the card catalog at libraries, and it doesn't require a cell phone with a camera or a set of specialized software, so I think the library example was a rather poor one anyway.
"For traditional barcodes you need to be a foot away from it at most," said Dr Mohan.
We scan bar codes from 5 feet away regularly in our DC. All of the cartons and locations and upc's, you don't have to be that close, not sure why Dr. Mohan would make such an incorrect statement like that.
Heh, I figured someone would mention how the LOC is the more modern system. I figured the DD was more commonly known (I only learned of the LOC in the past year when I started borrowing books from the local university library).
All very interesting, but why did the sound track have to have some crap music playing the whole time ? Is the expected audience so vacuuous of mind that unless they have some noise running under the words they won't listen ? What is wrong with silence ?
I'm not really an expert on the subject (nor do I want to start a librarian flame war), but my understanding is that the LOC system produces a more logical arrangement of books in the context of a large university library, while the DD is better suited to small local libraries.
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To qualify for your rebate your must cut out the LED, send it in along with your completed rebate form, and hope it does not get crushed in the mail thus voiding the rebate.
Meanwhile the rebate company will be passing all rebate requests under a steamroller before processing.
The team has shown its barcodes can be read from a distance of up to 4m (12ft), although they should theoretically work up to 20m (60ft).
OK...and this is useful/necessary for retailers or libraries why?
What's wrong with QR codes or RFID?
Porquoi?
This sounds an awful lot like RFID and NFC (Near Field Communications). The purpose of these is to have inventory that can identify itself when 'pinged' (books, pallets, passports ...). This entails all kinds of things, like shelves that can inventory themselves, tracking an item from manufacturer through shipping, distribution and ultimately to the item in your hands.
"Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing." -- Salvador Dali
A specialized device will not replace something that is easily printed. I have a printer and can use one of the many barcode replacements to fulfill my personal and small business needs. While their system definitely seems cooler, I'm betting that when it's released it would require a specialized device to encode the bokodes and another to affix them to the tagged item.
RFID was quite expensive when first introduced, and is now dirt-cheap. This is an interesting technology to keep an eye on.
They seem to have a quite innovative technique to focus the bokode on a camera that's focussed at infinity - the bokode doesn't need to know the distance to the cameras lens/sensor and the camera doesn't need to be focussed exactly on the bokode in order for an image to be rendered on the camera's sensor.
In other words, the performance of it is not dependent on having the camera focussed properly, or being at exactly the right distance from the bokode - the camera simply needs to be focussed at infinity and pointed in the general direction of the bokode.
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Imagine the mischief in libraries. Carefully transplanted, books could even MORE confusingly be "redistributed" around libraries. Embedding a transceiver in the book would probably help combat this, but then it would be expensive to have new books fitted with them at the plant (a new sales strategy?) and older books may not be worth the retrofit/implantation.
But, imagine if restaurants or theatres or auto shops or places with lots of things that move and need to be tracked started using this. Tagging moviegoers won't go over very well. Tracking participants in indoor games or sports activities might automated camera coverage. Enough of these on sports wear would ensure optimal tracking.
Hell, we can put them on dogs, cats, dishes, toilet paper, glassware... Even the PHB and bean counters could now enjoy tracking pens to reduce their movements, except when being used for writing things not input into computers. Stamp em on employees heads or slap em on their backs as they enter the security check.
They might become fashionable as TOOTH BLING. Imagine all those poor ghettos-assed gold tooth shops attaching them designer-style. Even legit orthodontists might make money on them.
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Why not just use an IrDA transmitter? You can send far more information, it's cheap, there's lots of hardware to transmit and receive you can buy, and many phones already support it.
If dirt gets on the tag's lens, it'll likely have the same sort of effect as dirt on a camera lens does. You'll get somewhat decreased contrast, but the camera won't actually "see" the dirt on top of the tag, because it's focused at infinity, so it'll see "through" the dirty surface to the tag underneath.
The issue of privacy has been raised in the past, just as the advent of the barcode faced widespread resistance in 1974. Consumerists got laws passed in eight states that prevented cost savings of about $85,000 per store to be realized (due to required unit price tagging), which meant that in those states consumers paid more for their groceries. The movement was funded by the labor unions. According to industry experts, barcodes have served their purpose well and also served their time and now it's time for RFID to take over.