Ubiquitous information transfer across different platforms by QR codes

Abstract

Since the notion of ambient intelligence was proposed in the 90s, many researchers and companies have developed devices, applications and systems based on the idea of an intelligence environment. Despite the obvious benefits of ambient intelligent environments there are few examples of real-world realizations. One reason is that systems are developed in isolation according to their particular purpose. In fact, there are many systems that serve similar and overlapping functions in different situations, but these systems cannot easily be merged into one intelligent system. For example, a museum guiding system allows tourists through handheld devices to browse exhibition contents including text, pictures, audio, video, etc. However, often tourists cannot easily share information with each other when they come across interesting items. In order to help simplify sharing, we present five information encoding types based on Quick Response Codes (QR Code) that facilitate the connection of independent systems implemented on different platform such as smart phones or Java phones. Two case studies illustrating the use of these encoding types are presented. The first system is a travel assistant system where the traveler can share information through QR Codes and a Schedule Code which provides references to specific sites. The second system, the Mobile Bird Information Searching System allows discovered multimedia to be shared across smart phones to Java phones via QR Codes.