HCCBs. It doesn’t really sound very cool or exciting, does it. In fact, neither does ‘High-Capacity-Colour-Barcode’. Worse yet, even the general principle of a barcode is fairly…well, boring. They’re just the little lines you get on stuff in Sainsbury’s. And you know, with RFID, why would anyone even care about barcodes, or even bother to innovate them.
Because we still live in a very heavy printed world. RFID isn’t taking over any time soon. And HCCBs, they’re freaking awesome. They’re cool. The idea is cool, the concept is cool, the potential is cool.
What are HCCBs? HCCBs are printed patterns of cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black) with white lines. They look kind of funky to start with, but it gets better. HCCBs are extremely resilient. Their technology, and readability is meant to work, unimpaired, with a cell phone camera (very poor low light performance, poor colour distinction, awful white balance correction, usually slow shutters, generally low resolving power), and low quality print. So you can do things to HCCBs, and they still work. You can drop them into black and white, you can replace the triangles with an arrangement of…smarties, in short, as long as your final image represents the generated HCCB, you’re pretty much good to go.
That kind of covers what an HCCB is, but of course, the next question.
What do HCCBs do?!!
HCCBs contain approximately 13 bytes of information after error correction, and can ‘contain’ a number of different things. Essentially what an HCCB is, is a computer-vision readable link. Your eye and brain can’t decipher it, but it makes sense to Tag Reader. Tag Reader decodes the visual image into its contents. And it’s contents can be a number of things. It can be a basic text string, a web link, a VCard, or a dialer through to a phone number. The 13byte limitation isn’t a limitaiton, because of how the HCCB works – the HCCB doesn’t actually contain its contents, it contains a compressed link to the ultimate target on a Microsoft target. Think printed tinyurl or minify. Your Tag Reader equipped device decodes the HCCB, sends the decoded content to the MS server, and the server responds with what the HCCB is meant to have. The potential here becomes quite awesome. The obvious things are printed business cards with full vCard information electronically, a reinvation on the classical buried treasure, physically linking the web and the real world, or stamping someone else’s phone number on the back of a public restroom door with promises of a ‘good time’. Yes, it’s 2009, move with the times.
But beyond the possibilities of what you can do with it, is where you can put it. It’s printed, so it’s physical, it’s real, and it can go anywhere. You can have printed stickers and slap them wherever you want. You can, in a Banksy-esque style, deface classical art with youtube links to Rick Astley classics. You can be boring, and use it to provide ‘more information’ in traditional printed media (newspapers magazines). You can be vain and hang the HCCB for you on your wall at home, next to the visual interpretation of your DNA. You can project it on a wall, you can stick it on a 100ft high billboard. You could put it on a hillside and put yourself inside google maps or virtual earth.
Pretty damned cool for barcodes.
Want more?
Visit www.microsoft.com/tag for more of an overview
Visit tag.microsoft.com to make your own
Visit gettag.mobi on your phone (J2ME), iPhone, or Windows Mobile powered device. Data connection charges apply.
