Semacode — ready to play

I read about sema­code, real-world hyper­links some time ago but was under the impres­sion that soft­ware didn’t exist for my phone, a Nokia 3650. Luck­ily it turns out I was wrong, every­thing is work­ing fine now.

Small pix­ely images rep­re­sent an URL, allow­ing peo­ple with cam­phones to snap a pic­ture of the ‘link’ which launches the browser with the rel­e­vant web­site. Quite sim­i­lar to bar­codes, but the beauty of this tech­nol­ogy is, that quite a bit of the image can be miss­ing while it still works. Japan­ese magszines are already full of these and they make a nice lit­tle busi­ness card fea­ture I guess.

But. What if we sprayed or sticked a bunch of these all over town, made cheeky lit­tle web­sites only to be announced through this medium? A lit­tle urban game feed­ing the con­tes­tants with direc­tions, routes etc.? Obvi­ous signs to the in-crowd, mean­ing­less pix­els to passer-bys. Loads of pos­si­bil­i­ties; secret pass­words to var­i­ous events, stange inter­ac­tive games and so on and so on…

Any ideas? Who’s in?

Update: I’ve been play­ing with the recog­ni­tion of home­made sema­codes. Apart from var­i­ous trou­ble because of my phone’s des­per­ate need of a firmware upgrade and/or ar proper bash­ing, you need pretty good light­ing con­di­tions to get a proper shot. Which rules out quite a bit of the seedy places I imag­ine this stuff could have been put to inter­est­ing use. There’s also a lower size limit of the codes due to the dis­tance you have to be at to take the pic­ture. If you’re to close, you often block to much of the light with the phone itself.