what will the museum of the future be like?

Mobile technologies and museums

Now here's something good - QR (quick response) Codes . Imagine visitors swiping their mobile phones across a bar-coded exhibit and downloading content to their mobile device. I know the Tech are doing something like this with their tech tags. We've also had discussions about this elsewhere on this site with Renae's blog post .

Seems to me that QR codes may be something acheivable for us. I still think that mobile technologies are one of the key trends we need to watch - I did a blog post in January about web trends which members may find worth re-visiting if you are so inclined!

Tags: 2.0, Web, mobile_technologies, trends

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Permalink Reply by John Tann on July 31, 2008 at 10:15am

This is the only place that I have read about QR codes, so I may be way out here, but by an engineering yardstick, this is a spastic technology. A 2 mega pixel photo (ie low resolution) contains 6 million bytes of information ie 6 million characters. If that can only produce 50 (or 250) characters of text, then let's not go there.
I think we should sit back and wait for something more sensible to come along. It will.

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Permalink Reply by Vanessa Smyth on July 31, 2008 at 12:47pm

According to the Telstra promotional blurb, the code should be able to take up to 7000 digits and 4300 alphanumeric characters.

I have come across a QR blog which refers to the Japanese developer's (Denso-Wave) technical specs - apparently when printing or displaying a QR-Code there has to be a margin or “quiet zone” around the code in order to locate it and decode it properly. This “quiet zone” must have a minimum of 4 modules (a module has the size of the smallest square in a QR). Maybe it isn't necessary to reduce the density of the characters if there is a sufficient quiet zone around the code...my phone doesnt have the reader so I can't experiment.

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Permalink Reply by Seb Chan on July 31, 2008 at 8:37pm

Yeah that might need a different generator - I'll suss it out. Given that people are having difficulty with iPhones on more complex codes it may also be combination of generator and reader.

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Permalink Reply by Seb Chan on July 31, 2008 at 9:43pm

yeah . . . it is a mix of reader and generator. the more data in the code the higher resolution you need your reader to be able to pick up. if you are talking a cameraphone and a human hand holding it then there is no way the higher density codes will be readable. check out this code (from Wikipedia) which is a chunk of Lewis Caroll, and tell me your mobile phone camera could disambiguate it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:WalrusAndCarpenter.png

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Permalink Reply by palmyre on October 1, 2008 at 2:46am

I've been exploring a less physically 'invasive' model of engaging high school student in commenting and gathering information in art museums in my postdoc research project http://www.intermedia.uio.no/display/Im2/Gidder The collaborating art museum would not allow QR codes mounted near the art!