We are witnessing an explosion of adoption of the technology called QR code which is progressively pervading our daily lives: many periodicals correlate their articles with a QR Code which allows for the listening of audio recordings or the watching of videos which blend the experience of reading with a multimedia flux of perfectly contextualized information and, moreover, available at the very same time of the reading, with the reader having no need to gain access to devices different from the ones they always carry with them: the cell phone or the smartphone.

Countless other examples, especially on an international level confirm the validity of this “system”: from the labeling of items of clothing, to bottle wines with a QR code which make one able to see the farm where it was produced, and maybe make an online purchase to comfortably receive at your home, everything while sipping a glass of wine in front of the bottle at the restaurant table.

Google, has sent 200.000 posters to as many stores, with the image of the QR Code corresponding to their description page on Google Maps ( My Favorite Place project)

Countless are also the advertising campaigns on newspapers or through bill postings which enable to “enter” in communication with a virtual message spread by the code printed on a corner of the page.  Currently, I am dealing with the QR code subject, and its possible models of use, the real advantages  companies might have by adopting it, and the search for new applications which exploit to the maximum the explicit and implicit features of this technology.

That’s how my reflexions are born in regard to an attempt to expand the horizon and give a lecture of the rapidity of the adoption of this technology, since according to me, we are witnessing an important phenomenon which is creating a modality of connection between the real and the virtual world. In fact, we can consider the QR Code: a gate between the physical world and the virtual one, finally a simple and useful modality to access the content of the online world with features of ubiquity, immediacy and simplicity we have always expected.

A simple design applicable everywhere is the NetGate: the entrance gate to the Network and amplifies the capacity of communication through the use of the multimedia potential of Internet.

QR Code as Internet ON Things, waiting for the internet of things, we are witnessing the birth and growth of an “Internet ON Things”; the combination of innovative technologies and the diffusion of those already mature can make inanimate object “talk” by connecting them in real time with the Network.

This has become possible not because of the invention of a revolutionary graphic coding system which allows for the insertion of 4096 alphanumeric characters in an area of only a few square centimeters, but the reasons for the rapid spread of the QR code are instead: the combination of availability of its technology, the adoption of mature technologies such as the camera or the cell phone, the availability of mobile Internet connection at convenient conditions of use, and as it random happens, an elevated usability of the entire system owed to the fact also to the multiplication of software for the interpretation of codes on various cell phone models.

Oddly enough the most innovative features of the QR code ( density of information and decoding speed) available since 1994, are absolutely not the conditions necessary for the current success: in fact, in current applications the number of maximum characters is a few dozens and as a consequence the decoding speed results elevated.

In the same way, the system was designed and launched in the logistics sector as an evolution and substitution of less performing systems, but today logistics is the sector less influenced by the QR Code.

INTERNET ON THINGS represents a scenery in which the Network acts as a pervasive layer of information and emotion to which you can enter in a simple way from the real world by interacting with the objects that constitute it.