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QR Codes For Memorials

Posted by samzenpus on from the last-message dept.

mikejuk writes "Companies in America, Denmark and the UK are adding QR codes to gravestones that can be used to view online memorials via smartphones. The idea is that these living headstones can include photographs, videos and memories of the dead person from family and friends. Genealogists and historians have always found graveyards a useful resource. If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations."

24 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. EEEEEEE by Mr.+Kinky · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations

    Yes, put obsolete technology there. Why not just put floppies?

    You don't need QR codes for that information anymore. Everything is saved anyway. You could just put the persons social security number there and all that information and much more would still be available.

    1. Re:EEEEEEE by aNonnyMouseCowered · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The QR codes would only work as advertised if the "cloud" part of the system is still intact. Otherwise you'd have just some fancy hieroglyphics for future archaelogists to decipher. If this is the case, why not just carve out the human readable URL of the poor dude's FB/Twitter/G+ page.

    2. Re:EEEEEEE by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I have one word for those that think this would be a good idea....Geocities? Anybody remember Geocities? people had their whole lives on those pages and guess what? Went tits up and bye bye all that work. Of course most people aren't web designers so it was a brightly colored nightmare, but hey, some people like gaudy crap.

      For these to work you have to have a "permanent cloud", we're talking centuries permanent, except the cloud is the biggest "her today, gone this afternoon" medium we have. if you want to do something like this what we need is the data embedded in the stone itself, hell putting a fricking flash stick in the rock would be a better idea than this, at least if you have it built in the rock, with it read only, it should last for decades if the person isn't rock star popular.

      TLDR? Stupid idea because it depends on something that never lasts.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    3. Re:EEEEEEE by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 2

      I have one word for those that think this would be a good idea....Geocities?

      From the point of view of the business providing the website, it is a good idea. You can take the money and run because your customers are all dead!

      It is a pity that some cybersquatter has managed to nab deathmaskbook.com, because that would be the ideal domain name for the job.

      Gadget_Guy likes this post from beyond the grave.

    4. Re:EEEEEEE by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      The QR codes would only work as advertised if the "cloud" part of the system is still intact.

      Not true. A QR code can contain a lot more than just a link. It could contain the deceased's name, identifying info, and links to more than one URL. Also, "the cloud" as it exists could disappear, and the QR code code be relinked to something else.

      Otherwise you'd have just some fancy hieroglyphics for future archaelogists to decipher.

      QR codes are not that difficult to decipher, even if you were starting from scratch. The are designed to provide info, not hide it. But since the specs are publicly available and widely disseminated, I don't think anyone will be starting from scratch.

      If this is the case, why not just carve out the human readable URL of the poor dude's FB/Twitter/G+ page.

      Because an individual URL is far more likely to not work in the future, provides far less information, and is less convenient to access since it has to be typed in rather than just pointing a camera at it.

    5. Re:EEEEEEE by camperdave · · Score: 2

      QR codes can encode any binary data. They don't need to store a URL to the "cloud". Just load the data into a QR code directly.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    6. Re:EEEEEEE by ColdWetDog · · Score: 2

      The cloud is the most permanent and robust source of information that humanity has ever devised.

      It's a just a little mind boggling that you can call something that is perhaps 50 years old 'permanent and robust'. Especially when it relies on continual functioning of an enormously complex pile of multiple technologies which require the most advanced technical and social system ever cobbled together by humans.

      Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  2. Companies don't live forever. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations

    Or not, if these companies go out of business, which is extremely likely to happen in the next few decades or centuries.

    If you want to add additional data, encode it somehow and engrave it on the stone itself. And put an additional tablet in each graveyard explaining the encoding.

    1. Re:Companies don't live forever. by Sarten-X · · Score: 2

      QR codes can store more data than just a website address. In addition to a URL, name, dates, and a brief biography are reasonable things to include in a large QR code. Future readers could get the website if it's still around (or archived somewhere, assuming the URL follows a suitable format), but even if that's unavailable they could still get more information than just a name.

      The problem here is that with more data included, the code's footprint will necessarily increase, or its details will get smaller. One's ugly, and the other's more fragile.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    2. Re:Companies don't live forever. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
      The point of headstones isn't to have information available for a few months or years, it's to have information available for centuries . The internet hasn't been around for very long compared to the headstones being used by Genealogists and historians, and there's no guarantee that it won't change completely in the next 20 years in such a way as to be unrecognizable. Carving a URL in stone for future historians a hundred years from now is as pointless as having the phone company list your address as "I'm currently standing in front of the checkout at the grocery store" in the phone book.
      For the record, here is a list of things that can go wrong with your plan of using private hosting and having a trust handle the hosting costs:
      1. Internet addressing method changes completely in 20+ years, and memorial site is no longer accessible because nobody uses http://.../ for anything, and there aren't any servers running that protocol anymore.
      2. Civilization collapses and internet infrastructure is gone, leaving your QR code pointless even if people are able to figure out how to decipher it when civilization eventually recovers.
      3. Provider experiences catastrophic systems failure, all sites hosted (including your memorial) are lost.
      4. Trust runs out of money due to bad investments or rapidly increasing costs, and provider shuts down site due to lack of payment.
      5. QR codes fall out of popularity, as something else becomes popular instead (which then also falls out of popularity, and is replaced by yet another thing), scanning software becomes unavailable, and people wonder why grave markers from 100 years ago all have that weird staticy-looking square on them. Historians hypothesize that it was some kind of tribal identification symbol. Also, they regret that there's no actual useful information about the people buried there.

      Like the GP said, you can include the bio in the QR code. Again though, this seems pointless when you can use the same space to just carve the bio in human readable characters if you want it included at all. If you're totally opposed to normal people being able to read it just by looking at the stone with their eyes, have it done in Klingon or something.

    3. Re:Companies don't live forever. by hawguy · · Score: 2

      QR codes can store more data than just a website address. In addition to a URL, name, dates, and a brief biography are reasonable things to include in a large QR code. Future readers could get the website if it's still around (or archived somewhere, assuming the URL follows a suitable format), but even if that's unavailable they could still get more information than just a name.

      The problem here is that with more data included, the code's footprint will necessarily increase, or its details will get smaller. One's ugly, and the other's more fragile.

      The capacity of a QR code sounded a little limiting to hold any kind of meaningful biography (4296 ASCII characters), but after looking around at some obituaries they seem to be mostly around 1200 characters long, the longest I could find in a brief search was only 3100 characters long.

    4. Re:Companies don't live forever. by pnot · · Score: 3, Informative

      QR codes can store more data than just a website address. In addition to a URL, name, dates, and a brief biography are reasonable things to include in a large QR code.

      But at that point you may as well write the brief biography in English, and save your descendants from having to figure out how to read a QR code.

      If our forebears had done this a hundred years ago, great-great-grandad's brief biography would be encoded on a bronze punch-card in an encoding nobody can find the documentation for. Text, on the other hand, has been working just fine for millenia.

  3. Future generations? by pnot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the QR idea takes hold memorials will be able to tell much more to future generations.

    Uh huh. How many future generations? For how long are QR codes going to be a popular format, and for how long are these companies going to be around?

    1. Re:Future generations? by Minwee · · Score: 5, Funny

      QR codes may not be popular for long, but they are easy enough to build a program to read. Do you really think future humans will be carrying around weaker computers than we are now?

      The company being around is not that important considering you can store ~2KB in a QR code.

      Wonderful. Future humans with their amazingly powerful computers will be able to decipher such amazing messages as "http://www.qr-memories.co.uk/memorials4less/115223/b11235/4.gif".

      Through sufficiently advanced technology, future generations may eventually use that message to discover that their great uncle Leon's favourite number was 404.

    2. Re:Future generations? by gman003 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      More to the point, how long are QR codes on a tombstone going to be readable?

      When I visited England, I visited several churches and graveyards. Some of them were barely legible, after sitting out in the rain (and acid rain) for centuries. I know QR codes have a lot of error correction on them, but are they going to be readable after 1cm of stone has eroded away?

  4. +5 Monday Morning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Looks like I chose the wrong week to try and avoid stupidity.

    This is the stupidest idea I've heard since Friday. I must be reading Slashdot again.

  5. Re:QR codes != information by Sarten-X · · Score: 3, Informative

    Wrong. QR codes can store over 2KB of arbitrary binary data.

    --
    You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  6. What will future generations really see? by ljhiller · · Score: 4, Funny
    Get the best deals on:
    Cars
    Mortgages
    Viagra
    This website www . eternalmemories . com is available. (C) 2015 Godaddy.com

    Nothing is so impermanent as an online web service.

  7. Re:QR code ubiquity by Sarten-X · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thanks to the error correction algorithms and necessarily-lenient recognition, QR codes can be colorful, stylized, and smoothly integrated into most graphic designs.

    Of course, the disconnect between nerds who know this and the artists who make the signs means we'll be stuck with ugly QR codes for a while.

    --
    You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  8. Obilg. by Kell+Bengal · · Score: 2

    Last post!

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    altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
  9. Re:QR code ubiquity by h4rr4r · · Score: 2, Funny

    RUINED?

    A poster with a QR code ruins the look?

    White people problems.

  10. Re:QR codes != information by afidel · · Score: 2

    I don't think the version 40 QR code is going to be feasible in granite. The version 4 seems the most likely to survive and it's only 50 characters.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
  11. Re:QR codes != information by Sarten-X · · Score: 2

    Printed on the back side of the stone as a 6" square, the version 40 code has large enough pixels that a deep engraving could survive a century or two.

    --
    You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
  12. QR codes store information.. by xtal · · Score: 2

    A referral to an online service is pretty stupid for a long-term idea. Nobody will care in 100 years.

    What IS neat is QR codes can store information directly, in a standard format, that can be manually decoded BY HAND if you have to. This is useful for "the long haul". Most people are not aware there are different sizes of QR codes, and the standard encoding can hold a kilobyte or so of information.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code

    Etching the QR code on the stone is not ideal. If I wanted it to last very long time, I'd look at using a gold or platinum protective film (perferably coated as to not look valuable) with the QR code lithographically etched onto an aluminum plate, or something along those lines.

    A more interesting idea would be the design of a long-life semiconductor that could flash out a message in morse code. I think it'd be feasible to design something that would remain functional for 100 years or more with current technology. Maybe more with descretes, and if you didn't want to have an onboard power source like a small solar cell / gold ultracapacitor.

    For really long term, it has to be decodable by hand or with the information on the device.

    Mortality is a bitch.

    --
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