Barcamp Brighton - QR codes and Wumpuses
11/09/2007
‘QR codes and Wumpuses’ was the title of the talk I gave this weekend at Barcamp Brighton - another event this weekend alongside dConstruct in Brighton. Barcamp invited every participant to contribute via a presentation or small show and tell.
In this talk I tried to introduce everyone to QR codes - a form of barcode able to hold more information that standard barcodes, and readable by camera phones.
QR codes and their interaction with the camera phone are already commonplace in, unsurprisingly, Japan, where they are used in billboards, magazines, video games and as personal idents.
To demonstrate a simple fun application of QRcodes i created wallchart full of QR codes , which allowed people to interact and play the classic early computer game Hunt the Wumpus.
Each QR code contained a url. By scanning QR codes in each room users were given a url to access, linking their physical location to a virtual one.
The point of the Wumpus Hunt was to demonstrate that things become a lot more interesting when you have a dynamic web application behind the links embedded in your QR codes. The same token can provide different results for each user as a web app maintains the state. Added bonuses like interaction or data aggregation, occur as the whole game gets logged in a database.
So why are we talking about this? Simple.
Applications of this technology are perfect for engagement within art galleries and museums.
- Collection items are tagged with QR codes.
- Visitors interact with items through their phones
- Visitors receive extended information as an interactive exhibition guide
Furthermore, personal favorites lists with a ’save this’ button could be used for
- Personalised guides to an exhibition
- Latter retrieval of your visit
Finally, you could achieve the Web2.0 Holy Grail of generating content simply by user interaction, aggregating all this information, providing a recommendation list of ‘people who also liked this’.
The future looks fun with QR codes.
You can see more details about it all on the site I set up at www.QRtists.com, which gives you the software and codes to set up and play your own live Hunt the Wumpus game, or play in your browser.
A slideshow of the presentation is also available on SlideShare.
Posted in Events, Technology in public spaces
All about Mobile Life - Playing with QR Codes Says:[…] Category: Camera Phones By editor at 21:57Some inspiration to play with QR Codes: Barcamp Brighton - QR codes and Wumpuses There is also a cool way to pick a winner with QR Codes: Use offline codes with simple text QR […]
Team Kane Street » Blog Archive » links for 2007-09-14 Says:[…] Barcamp Brighton - QR codes and Wumpuses | blog.cogapp.com (tags: barcode QRcode mobile) […]
Tristan Roddis Says:Update: it appears that the Pet Shop Boys also like QR codes:
Tristan Roddis Says:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=VXg6_oFUfvk&sdig=1
Tristan Roddis Says:And apparently, it’s not only the Pet shop Boys - the Sun newspaper is making a big push to promote and use them to allow readers to easily link to mobile content (although I failed to find anything about it on their site). See Gomonews for more details.
Barcamp 2 | blog.cogapp.com Says:[…] Roddis attended the first Brighton iteration last September and blogged his experience here and here. These are fantastic events for the Brighton digital community and the participatory nature of the […]
My brief barcamp | blog.cogapp.com Says:[…] unlike last year, I wasn’t able to attend any of the sessions this barcamp. However, I did manage a flying […]
Ian Foster Says:One limitation with printed QR codes is that the webpage the QR Code points to is static. If you change your domain name or want visitors to go to an alternative webpage after you’ve printed your QR code on your T-shirt, literature then your stuck. http://www.qrme.co.uk allows you to point your QR code to any webpage and allows you to update your QRme profile anytime to point your QRcode to a new website. Effectively giving you a dynamic QR code.
Bring on the Spimes | blog.cogapp.com Says:[…] If all of this sounds a bit Orwellian: you’re right. However, it all depends on who has access to the information, and how much you choose to disclose. If you yourself can get at the data, then I can imagine it being very useful. For example, you could ask the system ‘give me a list of all the people I talked to at that conference I went to two years ago’. (in practice, the exact query would have to be more like ‘get me a list of all the people who remained within a two metre radius of me for more than 5 consecutive minutes’, but you get the idea). Equally, and potentially more relevant to the museum world, you could lend each visitor to your gallery an OpenBeacon badge, and then they could use their mobile to read extra information about the object they are standing next to without having to type in any IDs nor scan QR codes. […]