There was a time, in living memory, when supermarket cashiers punched in the price of every item on a cash register. Then, along came the barcode and the scanner.
Barcode Invention
Work on developing a system that would automatically scan and record product prices began in 1948. Bernard Silver and Norman Woodland were graduate students at Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Technology. According to Tony Seideman in his article “Barcodes Sweep the World” the two students overheard a food chain president “pleading with one of the deans to undertake research on capturing product information automatically at checkout.”
The dean didn’t think much of the idea, but Silver and Woodland were intrigued and went off on their own to try to develop a system. They came up with a primitive version of what is common in almost every store today. They sold the patent to their invention to Philco in 1962. Philco then sold the patent to RCA, which started developing the technology.
IBM Wins Barcode Development Race
IBM got wind of RCA’s research and decided to compete. As it happened, Woodland was working for IBM at the time and he was given the challenge. Eventually IBM’s Universal Product Code was chosen as the industry standard. Seideman writes that, “No event in the history of modern logistics was more important. The adoption of the Universal Product Code, on April 3, 1973, transformed barcodes from a technological curiosity into a business juggernaut.”
Now the Barcode May Disappear
According to BBC News (July 27, 2009) “Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.”
The device is 3mm in diameter; that’s about the size of the @ symbol on a typical computer keyboard. It consists of a light-emitting diode, covered with a tiny mask and a lens. The BBC’s technology reporter Jonathan Fildes writes that, “Information is encoded in the light shining through the mask, which varies in brightness depending on which angle it is seen from.”
Dr. Ankit Mohan is one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers behind the work. He says the Bokode can be read by a cell phone from 20 metres away. This would enable shoppers to scan shelves for nutritional information as well as price comparisons.
Dr. Mohan told the BBC that there a plenty of other applications: “Let’s say you’re standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you’d immediately know where the book you’re looking for is.”
Cost of Bokode Will Come down
The tags currently cost about $5 each, but the price is expected to come down to about five cents. The MIT News Service (July 24, 2009) says the Bokode devices currently “require a lens and a built-in LED light source, but future versions could be made reflective, similar to the holographic images now frequently found on credit cards, which would be much cheaper and more unobtrusive.”
MIT adds: “The name Bokode comes from the Japanese photography term bokeh, which refers to the round blob produced in an out-of-focus image of a light source. The Bokode system uses an out-of-focus camera…to record the encoded information from the tiny tag.”
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