Imagine this... Your class has created a walk through exhibition in your school. The items have an A4 sheet with a brief description and a funny looking barcode in the bottom right hand corner of the page. Students and parents visiting the presentation carry around an iPad or iPhone connected to the schools wireless network.

As they see something of interest and read the fact sheet, they decide to find out more... They click on the tag reader application on their smartdevice that has a camera and point the camera at the barcode. The barcode reader interprets the barcode and immediately starts a browser and visits a website with more information on the subject, complete with videos and audio.

The tag reader is free and so is the creation of the tags. I have opted for the Microsoft barcode tags but there is another version which is open source and also has free readers and creators.

If you just want to read tags/barcodes, get the free reader by pointing your mobile device (it will need a built in camera) to  http://gettag.mobi  on your mobile phone browser.

Microsoft Tag can be used virtually everywhere in the world.

If you would like to create your own tags (barcodes), create a Microsoft Live account and go to http://tag.microsoft.com/ and start creating tags that point people to web sites, dial phone numbers, send business cards or display plain text information.

All of this is free - of course if you are using a 3G network, you will be using data connectivity to visit the web pages associated with the tag.

Here is an example of one that I created as a test. Try it out with your smart phone and see where it takes you...

 

 

This entry was posted on November 18, 2010 at 4:20 PM and has received 358 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.