Son of CueCat? Purdue Professor Embeds Hyperlinks

rbook writes "Remember :CueCat, the "free" (as in beer) bar code scanner that was supposed to change everything by allowing advertisers (or whoever) to put hyperlinks in printed material? Well, the idea is back, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education: 'People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That's the idea behind Sorin Matei's project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.' Photographing an image and uploading it sounds like more trouble than scanning a bar code to follow a URL, but they figure you can take the photograph with your smartphone and view the web page automatically on the mobile device." It looks like standard QR codes are embedded; what Ubimark is pushing is "a publishing environment which combines print books, ubilinks, a centralized Internet based interactive information repository and computer displays."

Comments

Re:Bar none

[mspohr]

... or something like the BarCode Scanner application for Android which uses the camera to read 1d and 2d barcodes and takes you to the web page/ download/ web search/etc. This is really easy to use. Just point it at the barcode and it figures out what to do.