PUBLIC MARKS with tag barcode

An excellent identity for Consumer Society and Citizen Networks, a Ukrainian organization that protects the rights of consumers.  Designed by Kaffeine Communications, the image combines “…a bar code – as a symbol of consumption – and an umbrella – as a symbol of protection’.

The device, if it really comes out, will scan bar codes printed on products to automatically find the lowest price on Rakuten’s gigantic site for the item in question (after connecting it to a computer, obviously).

But a funny thing happens when you put technology into the hands of real people. Stickybits launched at SXSW, and as William Gibson famously said, the street finds its own use for technology. In the case of StickyBits, people figured they could scan any bar code and attach annotations. And it turns out, there are a hell of a lot of barcodes in our lives every day. And it also turns out, StickyBits supports the use of any barcode as a tagging location.

Bokode: Imperceptible Visual Tags for

Camera Based Interaction from a Distance

The term “2D Barcode” is the name given to the next generation of the barcodes we are used to on everyday packaging and products. Before digging into 2D barcodes, we need to explain the history of 1D barcodes and how we arrived at this point. 1D barcodes are the traditional barcodes we see everyday, they are called one-dimensional because their pattern of thick and thin vertical bars is read in only one direction, from left to right.

OilCan inserts some powerful buttons into normal websites, and that power comes from Android intents. We didn't write a barcode scanner or the radar app into OilCan, but using intents we can launch those apps with parameters. We can request the Barcode Scanner app to scan something and return the code to us, or launch the Radar app with a specific lat/lon.

A rough guide to standard encoding of information in barcodes

Written in the highly accessible Processing scripting language (designed specifically for artists and designers), Barcode Plantage is a neat little program. It takes a barcode and processes it using certain algorithms to create a tree-like image unique to the code, complete with key info such as country of origin and manufacturer.

Barcodes, or UPC symbols, these ubiquitous emblems of our consumer civilisation, have received a radical makeover by a Japanese firm D-Barcode - and this time their ideas ended up on grocery products all over Japan.