ShotCode is a circular barcode created by High Energy Magic of

Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

. It uses a dartboard-like circle, with a bullseye in the centre and ''datacircles'' surrounding it. The technology reads databits from these datacircles by measuring the angle and distance from the bullseye for each. ShotCodes are designed to be read with a regular camera (including those found on

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

s and

webcam A webcam is a video camera which is designed to record or stream to a computer or computer network. They are primarily used in videotelephony, livestreaming and social media, and security. Webcams can be built-in computer hardware or peripheral d ...

s) without the need to purchase other specialised hardware. ShotCodes differ from matrix barcodes in that they do not store regular data - rather, they store a look up number consisting of 40 bits of data. This needs to link to a server that holds information regarding a mapped

URL A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...

which the reading device can connect to in order to download said data.

History

ShotCode was created in 1999 at the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

when researching a low cost vision based method to track locations and developed

TRIPCode An imageboard is a type of Internet forum that focuses on the posting of images, often alongside text and discussion. The first imageboards were created in Japan as an extension of the textboard concept. These sites later inspired the creation of ...

as a result. It has been used to track printed TRIPCode paperbadges in realtime with webcams. After that in Cambridge it had another research use; to read barcodes with mobile phone cams, and they used TRIPCode in a round barcode which was named SpotCode. High Energy Magic was founded in 2003 to commercialise research from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Laboratory for Communications Engineering. Least Bango.net, a mobile company used SpotCode 2004 in their ads. In 2005 High Energy Magic Ltd. sold the entire SpotCode IPR to OP3. Afterwards the name was changed from SpotCode to ShotCode. Heineken was the first company to officially use the ShotCode technology.

ShotCode's software

The software used to read a ShotCode captured by a mobile camera is called ‘ShotReader’. It is lightweight and is only around 17kB. It ‘reads’ the camera’s picture of a ShotCode in real time and prompts the browsers to navigate to a particular site. The last website update was from 2007, suggesting that updates for phones based on

Android Android may refer to: Science and technology * Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system ** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...

and iPhone will not be available.

External links

*https://web.archive.org/web/20060412031020/http://www.shotcode.com/ official ShotCode website.
Using visual tags to bypass Bluetooth device discovery, Mobile Computing and Communications Review, Volume 9, Number 1, 2005
(by SpotCode people)

*RoBCode Generator https://github.com/rbur004/svg_rob_code
{{Barcodes Barcodes Computer-related introductions in 1999

History

ShotCode's software

See also

External links