On QR Codes and their readers

I got intrigued by a certain post that I came across in our forums on windows live barcode launching.

I read aroud QR (Quick Response) Codes and according to wikipedia, it’s a matrix code created by Denso-Wave, a Japanese corporation in  1994. The name was given apparently because the contents of the code could be decoded at high speed. Read more

I wanted to try it out for myself and found the only links on wikipedia were reader.kaywa.com that allowed capture through the more popular java enabled phones from nokia, sony ericson etc. I searched for one made for a smartphone (after trying in vain to load the java midlet on to my phone).

I found a site that offers a software called quickmark at http://diy.quickmark.com.tw/sa/ (has a link at the bottom to switch to english. I also had a bit of trouble because the units they supported didn’t include my xphone ii. So i tried those that seemed similar. After much trial and error, i found that the version for Dopod 575 (QuickMark ver 3.0) and 585 (QuickMark ver 3.1) worked fine with my phone.

 

Once I got the software set up, I tested it on the code generator found on the site and it actually works! well, not perfectly, it couldn’t read the code i generated out of a vcard though maybe my phone camera was too weak, i dunno. Here’s a pic of my phone and the actual QR Code I scanned my camera phone over:

                                   

Try it out! Yes, you can aim your camera at the monitor and it works fine hehe There’s also another site, http://qrcode.kaywa.com/ that generates the code and it works well with that too. Pretty neat cause the code can actually include the type of data it is, so when you decode it with your camera phone, it allows you to do something right away with the decoded data. For example, if the data was a URL, once it’s decoded, it gives you an option right away to visit the site. Other “data types” that i’ve tested and worked fine are phone numbers, SMS templates, plain text. from the previous site, http://diy.quickmark.com.tw/sa_eng/ there’s even an option to encode encrypted text! So once you decode it with your phone, it prompts you for a key, and if you enter the right key, it shows you the encrypted text. The quickmark site has more types, but i couldn’t get any vcard or mecard types decoded. there’s also a magic jigsaw but i wasn’t able to test it out because i was too lazy to look for a 4kb image :p

Pretty cool stuff, true to it’s reputation, very fast decoding. This definitely has a lot of possibilities for applications. hmm.. I’ll be thinking of a number of them on my way home…

 

Afterthought: I wonder what the code to generate the code for plain text looks like..