ShotCode is a circular barcode

Barcode

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional . Later they evolved into rectangles,...

 created by High Energy Magic of Cambridge University. It uses a dartboard-like circle, with a bullseye in the centre and datacircles surrounding it. The technology reads databits from these datacircles by measuring the angle and distance from the bullseye for each.

ShotCodes are designed to be read with a regular camera (including those found on mobile phone

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

s and webcam

Webcam

A webcam is a video camera that feeds its images in real time to a computer or computer network, often via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi.Their most popular use is the establishment of video links, permitting computers to act as videophones or videoconference stations. This common use as a video camera...

s) without the need to purchase other specialised hardware. ShotCodes differ from matrix barcodes in that they do not store regular data - rather, they store a look up number consisting of 40 bits of data. This needs to link to a server that holds information regarding a mapped URL

Uniform Resource Locator

In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

 which the reading device can connect to in order to download said data.

History

ShotCode was created in 1999 at the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 when researching a low cost vision based method to track locations and developed TRIPCode as a result. It has been used to track printed TRIPCode paperbadges in realtime with webcams. After that in Cambridge it had another research use; to read barcodes with mobile phone cams, and they used TRIPCode in a round barcode which was named SpotCode. High Energy Magic was founded in 2003 to commercialise research from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Laboratory for Communications Engineering. Least Bango.net, a mobile company used SpotCode 2004 in their ads. In 2005 High Energy Magic Ltd. sold the entire SpotCode IPR to OP3. Afterwards the name was changed from SpotCode to ShotCode. Heineken

Heineken

Heineken is a Dutch beer which has been brewed by Heineken International since 1873. It is available in a 4.6% alcohol variety in countries such as Ireland. It is the flagship product of the Heineken company and is made of purified water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. In 1886 H...

was the first company to officially use the ShotCode technology.

ShotCode's software

The software used to read a ShotCode captured by a mobile camera is called ‘ShotReader’. It is lightweight and is only around 17kB. It ‘reads’ the camera’s picture of a ShotCode in real time and prompts the browsers to navigate to a particular site.

External links

• http://www.shotcode.com/ official ShotCode homepage by OP3
• Diego López de Ipiña , Paulo R. S. Mendonça , Andy Hopper, TRIP: A Low-Cost Vision-Based Location System for Ubiquitous Computing, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, May 2002
• Using visual tags to bypass Bluetooth device discovery, Mobile Computing and Communications Review, Volume 9, Number 1, 2005 (by SpotCode people)
• SpotCode in action videos from University of Cambridge