Although widely adopted in product boxes on supermarket shelves, week magazines pages, outdoors, real state annoucement videos, tourist guides and so on, QR Code is still unknown to a large number of people.
QR Code is a two dimensional black and white bar code. It was first developed to be used in printed media, being its main goal to take the reader to a web site. This way, someone may get more information on the subject that grabbed his attention on the first place.
QR Code is read by smartphones cameras. Any cheap smartphone nowadays comes embedded with a bar code reader application by default.
A QR Code in a product box, for example, can bring a customer to a website that describes the product features, shows a brief history about the manufacturer, the way it was developed, where they get their feedstock, in other words: a place where the consumer can get a deeper knowledge about what he is buying.
In some cases you may get the product itself from the QR Code. For example, it is now possible to get a pizza from a restaurant pamphlet delivered in your mail box.
Some historical monuments have QR Codes on informative metal plates through which people may get extra data about that tourist attraction.
There is a huge number of uses for QR Code. But what every one of them have in common is to take someone from the real, physical world to the virtual one, that is, make someone access a website related to the subject.
In a quick Google search it is easy to find lists of creative uses for QR Code. But generally speaking it is pratically considered common sense not to use QR Code on eletronic media. That would be against its main purpose.
Why show a QR Code in an eletronic media if its goal is to take the user there? The user is already there. So it is considered that there´s no point in this approach.
But on a second thought... What if QR Code was used do take the user, not to a website home page, but to a download link?
This way if the user points his cell phone camera to the computer monitor, a file would be automatically transferred to the device. This would cause a curious feeling that the file is "jumping" out of the monitor directly to the cell phone. But that´s just the tip of the iceberg.
Just imagine url addresses that create PDF reports or Office documents, statistics, data consolidation, or any product which has the end user as a consumer. Through the use of this QR Code technology, allied to web systems and databases, it is now possible to offer to our clients to access information without even logging into a system.
It is like taking the data "for a walk outside". This way we are breaking the physical limits between the data and the end user, the consumer of the information.
An user could open an Excel sheet on his cellphone, just by pointing its camera to a QR Code. Even a printed one.
People on a meeting could get a presentation immediately during an event, by pointing their devices to a QR Code on the projector big screen.
Imagination here is the limit. With a little creativity it is possible to invent great uses for this innovative idea.
A step by step explanation is shown in the picture below:
I think that what we see here is a paradigm shift. The explained idea creates a totally different approach in systems development, making possible for the user consume information without the need of a computer graphical interface. This way, we would be creating a new form of relationship in computer science.
It would be possible to offer to the user a kind of menu (printed, like a restaurant menu), where he would see the printed QR Codes, all labeled with subtitles, for example: List of downtown buildings with accessibility, quarterly results chart, John Smith´s presentation, company´s contact list. And the user would choose what he want to get on his cellphone.
About this last example, I highlight the fact that it would be possible to ally this new approach to colaborative work (as in the web 2.0 concept). That would be a form in which data that being produced on the fly, by many co-workers typing on computer systems, would generate a consolidated product, that could after be consumed by everyone in the organization.
We can use this idea to change radically the way we work, produce and also the way how our users consume our systems.
About the author: Luiz Milfont (IT Systems Specialist).
No comments:
Post a Comment