This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
QR codes are on their way out, according to Andrew Lippman, director of the Viral Spaces research group at the MIT Media Lab. To replace them, Lippman and his graduate student Grace Woo have invented video response (VR) codes, designed for digital displays, which transmit data through light. VR patterns are imperceptible to humans, but are picked up instantly by smartphone cameras, and allow all kinds of data to be pulled from any video display.
To show off their new codes, Lippman's lab set up a public display called Newsflash: a wall of nine iPads showing the front pages of different newspapers with VR codes hidden in them. When you snap the photo, your phone can pull off specific articles, images and links from the display for future use. "We could have done this ten years ago, but no one was walking around with high-quality sensing devices then," says Lippman, 63. "Now you can use the sensor you've already got to capture personalised data from the world around you. They are a component of the future." Say "cheese", adverts.
pixels.media.mit.edu/newsflash
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
