Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [83]
Two-dimensional bar codes address some of the same purposes as passive RFID tags, though they require visual scanning (by a laser reader or compatible camera) to return data. While unidimensional bar-codes have seen ubiquitous public use since 1974 as the familiar Universal Product Code, they're sharply limited in terms of information density; newer 2D formats such as Semacode and QR, while perhaps lacking the aesthetic crispness of the classic varieties, allow a literally geometric expansion of the amount of data that can be encoded in a given space.
At present, one of the most interesting uses of 2D codes is when they're used as hyperlinks for the real world. Semacode stickers have been cleverly employed in this role in the Big Games designed by the New York City creative partnership area/code, where they function as markers of buried treasure, in a real-time playfield that encompasses an entire urban area—but what 2D coding looks like in daily practice can perhaps best be seen in Japan, where the QR code has been adopted as a de facto national standard.
QR codes can be found anywhere and everywhere in contemporary Japan: in a product catalogue, in the corner of a magazine ad, on the back of a business card. Snap a picture of one with the camera built into your phone—and almost all Japanese keitai are cameraphones—and the phone's browser will take you to the URL it encodes and whatever information waits there. It's simultaneously clumsy and rather clever.
Ultra-low-cost 2D-coded stickers allow what might be called the depositional annotation of the physical world, as demonstrated by the recent Semapedia project. Semapedia connects any given place with a Wikipedia page to that page, by encoding a link to the Wikipedia entry in a sticker. For example, there's a Semapedia sticker slapped up just outside Katz's Delicatessen on the Lower East Side of Manhattan; shoot a picture of the sticker with a compatible cameraphone, and you're taken to the Katz's page on Wikipedia, where you can learn, among other things, precisely how much corned beef the deli serves each week.*
* Five thousand pounds.
The significance of technologies like RFID and 2D bar-coding is that they offer a low-impact way to "import" physical objects into the data-sphere, to endow them with an informational shadow. An avocado, on its own, is just a piece of fleshy green fruit—but an avocado whose skin has been laser-etched with a machine-readable 2D code can tell you how and under what circumstances it was grown, when it was picked, how it was shipped, who sold it to you, and when it'll need to be used by (or thrown out).
This avocado, that RFID-tagged pallet—each is now relational, searchable, available to any suitable purpose or application a robust everyware can devise for it. And of course, if you're interested in literal ubiquity or anything close to it, it surely doesn't hurt that RFID tags and 2D codes are so very cheap.
Richly provisioned with such bridges between the respective worlds of things and of data, there is no reason why everyware cannot already gather the stuff of our lives into the field of its awareness.
Thesis 65
The necessary standards for the representation and communication of structured data already exist.
From the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the details of contemporary information technology—which is to say most of us—one factor that might seem to stand in the way of everyware's broader diffusion is the wild heterogeneity of the systems involved. We've grown accustomed to the idea that an ATM card issued in Bangor might not always work in Bangkok, that a Bollywood film probably won't play on a DVD player bought in Burbank—so how credible is any conception of the ubiquitous