Hello Bokode...
This little reflective red dot is in your future.
Just when we have grown accustomed to the ubiquitous beeping sound at supermarket checkout lines as our items are magically scanned at checkout, a new technology is about to emerge.
Standard Barcodes have been around for some time. They use a 2-Dimensional technique of optical encoding to store information information digitally.
Now researchers at MIT's Media Lab Camera Culture Group have hit upon a new way of storing information that has several clear advantages over standard Barcodes:
1) It requires much less space. It's about the size of the "@" symbol.
2) It can be read from a distance, up to several meters away.
3) It can store more information: thousands of bits.
4) It can be read by standard digital cameras, which are now common in cellphones, etc.
Bokode uses a brand new system of encoding visual data. It utilizes the angular dimension where light rays vary in brightness depending on the angle at which they emerge. The digital camera has to go into an "unfocused" mode to receive the digitized Bokode image.
It will do more than replace the archaic Barcode. It will find new applications that we can't even imagine.
Links:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~ankit/bokode/
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/barcodes-0724.html
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