Telstra, one of Australia's main carriers has come up with a good solution to datarate costs when accessing QR code content online. They have created their own "Telstra Mobile Codes" which are just QR codes under another name. However if you are on a Telstra mobile and access a telstra mobile code then the content is free - good marketing ploy! They are also shippng their own telestra reader on ( starting 7th July 2008) three handsets: Nokia 6120, Samsung U900T and Sony Ericsson W760i, otherwise you can download the reader. I used i-nigma to read telstra's codes on my N70 and it works fine, howver I can't use the video link because my IP is a UK one and telstra didn't lilke that!

Lets see how they take off in Australia which is a little slow in the uptake, but may benefit from  learning from everyone's mistakes. They have a dedicated website to the release of telstra mobile codes, but not being on the ground in Australia, I'm not sure how it is infiltrating through the mass media and whether the average Australian on the street is aware of this pending revoltuion. Can anyone in Australia let me know what is happening on the ground there?

Wikipedia no longer has an entry for physical world hyperlinking - its been superseded by object hyperlinking! Personally I like the term physical world hyperlinking better. Object hyperlinking sounds very dehumanised. They've now updated the entry  contain more detailed information about such practices and include the term "tagging" as a collective noun, which has been broken down into groups such as RFID, Virtual, text based, SMS and Graphical. So as the ground shifts, nomenclatures are emerging and according to the most current wikipedia update,  my investigation is now into graphical tagging. Interestingly enough wikipedia hasn't got a conclusive list of all the types of graphical tagging out there.

 
One type of tagging  that looks quite cool is Shotcode, which was developed by Cambridge University. They are not as prolific as QR-codes and I am not sure what the future for them is, but the artist in me says" hmm... they look pretty", which no doubt is too flippant for many tecchies, but ultimately if you want people to use the technology you develop, you've got to make it appealing.... and currently much of it is so user-unfriendly it is not at all appealing. On the left is the shotcode tag for my blog, and the reader does seem to support a much wider range of mobile handsets than the i-nigma reader for QR-codes does.

I’ve just spent the last 2 days in a workshop with Branded Meeting Places project at Edinburgh University. They have been great!! I met with a diverse group of people from a range of disciplines, yet we all had interests in common which made the group a very inspiring one.

We’d been brought  together for a workshop on tagging, looking at how these may be utilised in linking the physical world with the virtual. I’d been invited on account of my work with QR codes, and it has definitely given me a great food for thought with my own research. In particular The Branded Meeting Places group have been collaborating with Mobile Acuity who create image recognition software, to come up with Spellbinder which on their website is described as:

“..a new interactive digital medium based on camera phones and image matching. Using Spellbinder, digital content can be embedded in the real world by taking a photograph of an object or place. The digital content can be released by another user by taking another photograph of the same location. Spellbinder does not require special markers or barcodes to be placed in the world and works indoors or outdoors”

The creative scope for this is really limitless, especially when I think of it in the context of my own art practice.

On the first day we brainstormed ideas surrounding tagging. In groups we came up with possible applications of tagging and presented them to a vote to take one forward to build overnight. As it was 2 ideas were melded and three dedicated programmers worked through the night and morning to give us a working application to pay with.

The application that was built was called “Vocal Thumbs” which enables people to voice their opinions in a way which facilitates social networking via mobile phone. We were hoping to use audio, but that was not possible in the short turnaround time, but “Vocal Thumbs” worked via text messaging, so we all went out, tagged parts of Edinburgh, found each other’s tags and tested the system.

This very intensive group working to come up with a concept, build it and test it in 2 days is a very productive way of testing a concept and gaining feedback in a very short time frame. I think though, it is very reliant on the mix of people involved. Everyone there was positive,  committed to research and motivated in coming up with new ideas, and this enthusiasm was contagious. That is not to say however, at the end of each day we were a bit tired, but that good kind of tired where you feel like you’ve achieved something.

I’m doing a presentation on the 1st of May about my work for the Signals in the City exhibition and its forced me to think about qr-codes on a deeper level than most people seem to engage with. I've come to the conclusion that  looking at qr-codes just by themselves or just in terms of their technical aspects is a rather superfical approach.

The thing about qr-codes that really interests me is that they are physical world hyperlinks: how does this affect people? what impact does this have on social activities mediated by computers/ handheld devices?  It is this linking between physical and virtual spaces that I find intriguing, not the advertising, or the idea that I could call a taxi just by taking a photo of it (with its qr-code emblazoned on its side), not the idea of buying a bottle of coke just by taking a photo of the vending machine that it is in. Although these are amazing ideas this is where most people stop because these ideas in themselves are money making and sometimes I think that this can limit people’s ability to push an idea to its limits.

We need to think about how a user interacts with a mobile phone, their expectations when they take a photograph, what it means to be “in the world” physically while interacting in virtual space. People multitask when they use mobile phones, their attention spans are short and usually data rates are an issue. How do these affect all affect the experience of the user?

Going back to the physical word hyperlinking, if we stop for a moment and question the semiotics of such an act there is so much in this it could be a book in itself. In the 3^rd year of my undergrad degree I did performance studies, and the most informative aspect of the whole year was a research project I did on the Semiotics of the Theatre Experience. I never thought such a project would be useful now, but it is – semiotics of space, breaking down of actor vs audience space could be related to breaking down of virtual vs physical space where the audience belongs to the physical world and the actors to the virtual….

Channel 4 (UK) has launched a very cool site where you can take pix with your mobile phone of public art and send them to their server. They are then located on a map. This is an excellent use of locative media, the ubiquity of the camera and social networking.

At the moment most mapped public artworks  are in the UK, then Europe and a few in the US. Would be great to see some Australians posting works there. You can upload via a pc as well. Someone really should take a photo of whatever currently is decorating Taylor Square in Sydney!

Just discovered these irksome articles online... Is the British public that unadventurous that the Sun has to resort to these tactics so we aren't  light years behind places like Japan? *wry expression* I guess it is, when the main reason video became so big was because of porn...

QR code add ons and widgets are popping up everywhere it seems. Though what people are actually doing with them I have no idea. Two "barcode" readers have been developed for Firefox: The Barcode 0.1.2 developed by Duncan Sample and James Carter, and the Mobile Barcoder by Geek Shadow.

 I've downloaded The Barcode 0.1.2 which when I roll over the word "Barcode" that now appears on the bottom left corner of my browser, a QR code appears, but really it is quite useless - I can't screen grab it to actually use anywhere else,  and I can't see what the point is. Perhaps its not working properly on my setup (MacBook Pro latest version of Firefox). I mean I'm hardly going to surf the internet on my mobile phone at the same time as on my laptop, so I don't get it.... I've not yet tried the Mobile Barcoder, but since it says its experimental and so far only 3 people have downloaded it. I don't think I've fallen behind the game yet...

Mobilebarco.de is a German company who have developed a wordpress QR widget and they've also created a facebook app, which I have just added to my account. It provides a QR code of your facebook profile, and displays it on your profile page, which of course is redundant since you are already there anyway. Though, at least with the facebook app, you can download the image from facebook and have a .png file to use with other media. I've set my privacy pretty high on facebook, and I wonder whether the QR code profile link is really that secure. I am thinking that it would have to be... surely...  but then again developers overlook the simplest things sometimes... shall test it and see.

 I'm sure there are more out there, so shall do some trawling and see what I come up with. Any suggestions welcome!

A friend just posted me a link to this story about QR codes being used to tombstones. Hmmm, ok, nice idea...maybe...  but what if your dearly beloved departs from this world and you become administrator for their QR code linked site, and what if... posthumously they really piss you off (like giving all their millions to a cat instead of you), you could post all kinds of defamation up there, and think, no retribution!! Unless of course you believe in ghosts...or hell.  Oh,  I can really see this being a quagmire for all sorts of ethical arguments.

Wild imagingings aside and on a more practical level; as yet QR code technologies haven't really been future-proofed. They may not be around say, in a few hundred years. I can just imagine future archaelogists stumbling across a whole graveyard of QR code tombstones and thinking WTF? then making up some wierd theories to try and explain what all these  black and white squares are.