The pajamas you see below are called Smart PJs. Each of these kids pajamas have dots all over them. Those dots are QR codes. Each one has 50 different codes on it. When bedtime comes, the parents and children simply scan one of the dot clusters on the PJs and then sit back and watch their bedtime story unfold on their mobile device through the free Smart PJs mobile app. *
O_o
Excellent review of the guts of QRCodes here.
…an initiative dubbed Project Ingeborg is turning the municipality into a book repository of sorts with 70 QR code and NFC chip-equipped stickers. Plastered throughout town, they direct users to web pages where they can download public domain works, largely from Project Gutenberg. Oftentimes, e-books will be located in relevant locations — so you’ll be sure to find Arthur Schnitzler’s The Killer near the police station, for example. *
@MatthewBattles, “An antiskeuomorph from the future, @atrubek: @BERG’s qr-code clock http://qrtime.com/ ” *
Apopheniphilia:
I’m lying on the gum-specked pavement, ignoring the other people reaching into their pockets after smart phones for their own un-trusting reasons. From here I see strange markings. Calling them hieroglyphics is granting them too much signifier, as graphemes clearly look like things, and what these most resemble are splashes of paint. In fact, they are splashes of paint. Orbits of drips, scattered across the pavement like interstellar dust caught in the filaments of micro-gravity embossed into the fabric of space-time. Scribbles of silver paint marker, visibly more steady-handed and intentional than the markings in a toddler’s coloring book, but their meaning no less obscure. Postal Service Priority labels re-purposed into personal branding stickers, marking phone booths, newspaper boxes, and other paleo-infrastructural fixtures in a dense, overlapping network of clots fixed from past decades’ own obsolete life-blood. Scrapings of keys or other metal blades into plexiglass rain barriers; photographs of electron orbits around the molecular statements of anonymous graffiti artists. “Graffiti artist” may not be a controversial term anymore, but applying the phrase to any and every defacement of public space does not necessarily follow. And yet, I’m seeing the larger code again, and the streets are looking better. *
TMI:
You have a dozen lovers names tattooed on your bicep. And every piece of art has its own billboard to alert you of its existence. How many appliances in your house have a digital chime? Can you tell them apart? What do you gain from recognizing the voice of your coffee grinder, your toaster oven, and your iron? What are they telling you that you could not have gleaned from the smell of ground coffee, fresh toast, or a burned shirt? *
And this bit of wonderfulosity:
We are constantly overwhelmed by our internally autonomous odd-dot astrology, picking apart apopheniac patterns that we have constructed between the brick facades, the mirrored windows, the unplanned drips of paint, and the magic marker vector geometry that grows extremophilic over the surface of our perceivable world. I long for the day when you not only need to present your verified address to buy a QR sticker printer as you do a can of spray paint, but proof of age, as when you enter that kind of club. As if any such control would stop technology from seeking out its desires, when technology like this is the most rampant evidence that our cities are departing from a Technological Victorianism to return to a gorgeous, sleazy, semiotic burlesque. Technologies like QR codes are the beat that gets our society’s machines tapping their feet. From the gaping maw of our technological future comes ugly, distorted, beautiful music, singing out loudly from bricked and re-bricked exteriors, from rusting, twisting pipes, from arcing buss fuse boxes, as our constructions slowly devolve back into the calciferous strata from which their concrete was originally mined, and our culture rediscovers what it used to do to have a good time. *
All here.
Wow – the links are coming fast and furious. Critical mass reached?
The most frightening QR Hobo Code – Bad Coffee:
*
We present QR_STENCILER, a free, fully-automated utility which converts QR codes into vector-based stencil patterns suitable for laser-cutting. Additionally, we present QR_HOBO_CODES, a series of one hundred QR stencil designs which, covertly marked in urban spaces, may be used to warn people about danger or clue them into good situations.*
Via @doingitwrong.
Via my contact Flickrstream, this photograph of a QRCode in the NYC subway. Problem the first (as identified by the photoprapher, Adam Greenfield): no connectivity in the New York subways. So you scan and then… Problem the second (may be user error): I couldn’t scan the thing. I have successfully scanned QRCodes from my monitor – no luck this time. I fed the image to ZXing – the image crashed the application. It may well be scannable, but the noisiness of the code itself and the overlay of the surfer’s head make me suspicious. I’m thinking this may be code used as a signifier as much as anything else. “We’re beyond the leading edge here! Look – a decorative bar code!” If you’re using a QRCode as part of a marketing effort and want it to be read, keep it simple. If I go to the trouble of pointing a device at your ad to get more info, I’ve made an effort. If I’m rebuffed because your code is made of fail, you are much worse off than if you hadn’t used a QRCode at all. High contrast. Non-reflective surface. Short URL. Or not – it’s your wasted marketing budget.
Photo by Adam Greenfield, Urbanscale
Update: I stand corrected. Sharper-eyed Flickrer Vidiot detects the scanable QRCode buried in the designed-up larger version – look at the center of the square at 7 o’clock. Looks like a hella long URL (yes, I know, I’m ass-covering).
We here at The Local East Village wanted to know how many people in our community were using QR codes. To find out, over the next several days we will be distributing Local East Village flyers – on brightly colored paper – to local businesses. When the code is scanned, your smart phone visits a site that we run so we can keep a tally of visitors and then is directed to The Local East Village. We are distributing four different versions of our flyer so that we can see how many people are using QR codes in different areas. We’ll publish our findings in a few weeks and share our data with you. If you see one of our flyers be sure to scan it so you can take part.
Via @jayrosen_nyu
Earlier today, Google formally released Goo.gl, their URL-shortener, to the public. They’re calling it the “stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.” But it also may be the coolest thanks to an easter egg.As Google’s Matt Cutts’ just tweeted
out, if you simply add “.qr” to the end of any goo.gl URL, it will create a QR code. Scanning this with any QR code reader will take you to the URL. *
So – I run the URL for this post (http://mtoynbee.com/blog/?p=176) into goo.gl and get goo.gl/5LQW. I add .qr to it – goo.gl/5LQW.qr – and get:
*
Nicely done, Google, nicely done.
TechCrunch via @leslie.
