Why Can’t Smart Phones Read?

I’ve been investigating useful uses for QR codes and while I’ve got a couple…they still feel rather flimsy. Like the QR Code is being used as a cute novelty – rather than a way to enhance communication.

QR Codes are inherently temporary (as in, tomorrow a better encoding technology will exist and today’s readers aren’t future proof). People can’t read QR Codes. Only machines can. Text has a much longer lifespan. It’s more portable and more usable. In most cases the QR Code is linking to a URL or a short snippet of text anyway, so…..

Why can’t smartphones just read the text?

Rather than pointing your mobile device’s camera at a fugly barcode – what if you pointed it at a written out URL. The camera recognized it and asked you want you wanted to do w/ it (visit, send, save, copy).

Mobile OCR projects exist:

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