ShotCode

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

ShotCodes are designed to be read with a regular camera (including those found on mobile phones and webcams) without the need to purchase other specialised hardware. Because of the circular design, it is also possible for software to detect the angle from which the barcode is read. ShotCodes differ from matrix barcodes in that they do not store regular data - rather, they store a look up number consisting of 49 bits of data. This needs to link to a server that holds information regarding a mapped URL which the reading device can connect to in order to download said data.

History

ShotCode was created in 1999 at the University of Cambridge 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 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 realtime and prompts the browsers to surf to a particular site.

See also

*semacode

External links

*http://www.shotcode.com/ official ShotCode homepage by OP3
*http://www.shotcode.org/ free version of ShotCode (in beta)
* [http://www.shotcode.com/download List of phones which are supported by ShotCode reader]
* [http://www.shotcode.com/pricing Create your own ShotCode (commercial accounts, .org is free)]
* [http://paginaspersonales.deusto.es/dipina/cambridge/PUC/PUCpaper.pdf 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]
* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1055959.1055965 Using visual tags to bypass Bluetooth device discovery, Mobile Computing and Communications Review, Volume 9, Number 1, 2005] (by SpotCode people)
* [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/uid/spotcode.html SpotCode in action videos from University of Cambridge]