Aestheticodes

I almost completely forgot about this one. After one of the initial workshops along with Film/Animation, Puppetry and such, there was a following lecture in one of the Bonington theaters by researchers from Horizon.
This particular talk revolved around Aestheticodes, a visual recognition application for smart phones (from my initial experience of downloading it during the lecture). It functions like QR code, yet for more visual objects rather than barcode. I was not initially receptive at first, which I thought was because it might still be early and raw for people to pick up on, but it was really just because I had an Android phone (Sony Ericsson - Xperia). However, downloading and trying it on my girlfriend's iPhone had better results. I did a few of these quick doodles to have another go at it:

The dots in their respective regions served as the code for the application to recognise, and thus linked me to whatever webpage I had set it at. The question this raises for me here is how universal will the code be in terms of linking one to certain information. Will the QR code truly work in the aesthetic sense as well? It's a big challenge to the barcode matrix system, but I think when it matures further the results will be more interesting and popular.

The Blogger thing isn't letting me embed the YouTube interview with the chaps from Horizon, so here's a direct linky; otherwise, it's at the bottom of the Aestheticodes project page.

How this relates to my project is still something to ponder over in terms of the intricacy applied to audience engagement. Perhaps in an exhibition setting people could scan and get more online information that might for some reason not be in the gallery if I applied a unique code to the artwork or on the tags, but then the problem with that is that not everyone would have a smartphone... or heard of Aestheticodes. Again, a matter of gradual popularity.