Fun with High Capacity Barcodes Thursday, April 19 2007

Wanted to point you to some interesting new Microsoft technology - a high-capacity color barcode that can hold up to 3,500 characters of information. The BBC has a good summary, but I'll give you a quick quote here:

The code is made up of up to eight-different coloured triangles which are aligned left to right with each shape placed from point to base or vice versa.

That combination of colours and orientation of the triangles creates distinct patterns which can be read by piece of software which deciphers the data.

ISAN, the voluntary numbering system for the identification of audiovisual works, is the first organisation to license the technology.

By the end of the year the colour barcodes will appear on DVD disks and on Xbox 360 videogames.

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Up to 3,500 characters of information can be held in the code.

Because the barcode can be read by mobile phone cameras it can be used to connect the packaging to the online world.

What's interesting about this is it's a way to tie physical objects to your online world. Nintendo has done similar things before with the Game Boy Advance e-Reader that allowed you to scan barcodes (which in turn unlocked game content). What's different about this new barcode is that we can store a lot more information (almost 3.5 Kb of data), and you won't necessarily need special hardware to read the code. A simple cell phone picture uploaded to the LIVE cloud might be all it takes to enable all sorts of new game scenarios.

You can imagine rare objects or limited edition content that comes with your game (with one-time use codes). Or games that allow you to trade physical objects but be able to take advantage of them in game scenarios. I love that the sample art is of Viva Pinata - imagine getting rare pinatas and trading them across LIVE.

I know there have been variants of this concept before, but I'm hoping a combination of the amount of data that can be stored and the ubiquity of connected devices like cell phones means this actually takes off and enables some new game scenarios. Oh, and don't mistake the data size as being too small - you're not going to be storing huge textures in that, but developers are very familiar with tokenizing their data and you'd be surprised how much you can do in ~3.5 Kb.

9 comment(s)

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ZMan wrote on April 19, 2007 10:05 AM

Looks great but seems like you have to license it before you can use it in any way - I was hoping for some APIs to generate and/or OCR them. Lets hope MS research make the reading technology availalbe to everyone otherwise you are destined to become the next CueCat :-)

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wrote on April 19, 2007 10:54 AM

Oh man - I'd forgotten the CueCat... I had a few! :)

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Tom C wrote on April 19, 2007 11:46 AM

It will take a lot to convince me that this is more than just another attempt at integrating people more fully into the Live ecosystem. sigh....

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nopants727 wrote on April 19, 2007 12:36 PM

OCR from a camera phone could bring some interesting features.  It might also lead to even more advertising.

"Cool lets see what this HCB on the Blades of Glory DVD can show me.  Great, a link to more fucking Sony movie previews."

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ImaginedBug wrote on April 19, 2007 12:59 PM

Just wondering what would stop someone from making a "limited edition" HCB on their computer using a sample of one, and then send it to their friends so they can unlock the same content? Or will the codes in the HCBs be like license keys are now, meaning generated "randomly" and stored on a server for single-use?

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wrote on April 19, 2007 2:31 PM

To a certain extend people have tried this before (the mobile phone as barcode reader idea). Companies in Japan have been using a square barcode for years (you can see one on the homepage for Japan Today: http://www.japantoday.com/), although I doubt it carries anywhere near 3,500 bytes, and I have no idea what they're using it for (anyone know?).

It isn't immediately clear to me how you would use this amount of data, though. It's way more than you need for a GUID... or even a couple of GUIDs (we're talking 3 type-written pages here... a GUID only needs 32 bytes, if I remember right). You could use it to send character stats or even simple scripts, but to do that would be to open your game to hacking. It's safer, and in a network enabled world easier, to just encode a GUID and have it associated with the resource on your servers.

Still, an interesting idea and I'm sure someone will find something creative to do with it, if it doesn't cost too much to license.

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wrote on April 20, 2007 8:17 AM

Re: "Just wondering what would stop someone from making a "limited edition" HCB on their computer using a sample of one, and then send it to their friends so they can unlock the same content? Or will the codes in the HCBs be like license keys are now, meaning generated "randomly" and stored on a server for single-use?"

There's nothing that would keep a unique ID (or serial number) from being embedded in the barcode. That means an ID, once activated online (whether that's LIVE or another online infrastructure) could be deactivated... hence guaranteeing uniqueness.

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ImaginedBug wrote on April 20, 2007 3:20 PM

ah bugger... I was hoping you wouldn't say that ;)

It'd be interesting to see if people will start getting HCB tattoos like some have gotten regular EAN codes inked into their skins. Instead of a chip implant, put a hidden message in a tattoo.

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Enzo304 wrote on April 21, 2007 9:15 PM

So... I'm trying to figure this out.  Just something you take a picture/scan of, and then what?  Email to Live or whoever is doing it, and that unlocks something special?

I guess I'm just not very creative, as I don't see the point to this... Why can't the unlock code just be written on the disc like all the other game data?