The objective of this project is to investigate the viability of a novel approach to enabling cellphones and other sound-enabled devices to read barcodes by listening to and analysing sounds made by drawing a fingernail over an embossed or raised one-dimensional barcode.
The idea is inspired by Japanese musical roads - see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/13/japan.gadgets for an explanation. In brief, lines painted on the road are spaced such that, when cars drive over them, the vibrations play a tune. Traditional barcodes are also unevenly spaced lines. If they were raised (or embossed), the hypothesis is that, when someone scratches across with a fingernail (or similar) they will make a distinctive sound pattern that can be analysed and distinguished from other barcode patterns.
The objectives for this project are therefore to establish to what extent that is true (testing a range of barcode standards to discover the most effectively differentiated), to investigate approaches to reliably recognising the sounds so-produced and, if that proves impossible due to physical constraints (e.g. the sensitivity of microphones, the density of stripes in a barcode, the ability to sample accurately, the ability to deal with different speeds of scratching, problems with volume levels or extraneous interference), To identify a means of achieving the desired effect at low cost (e.g. by changing the encoding system, increasing the size of the barcodes or attaching them to a resonator).
A proof of concept application or applications should be created to enable the system to work on a cellphone, whether as a client application (e.g. iPhone or Android app) or server-side system, or both. |
