Machine-readable digital codes placed in printed marketing materials such as magazines, catalogs and fliers turn each printed page into a hyper link to web content.
Digital watermarks offer brand-sensitive companies an elegant, inobtrusive alternative to industrial-style barcodes and QR codes, allowing companies to easily extend their print campaigns to the mobile world without having to use visible marks that detract from the their brand.
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2 comments:
The challenge here is to introduce the watermarks so that they are imperceptible and yet easy to decode with a camera phone.
Unless you've got a very high resolution camera phone with very good focus, I don't see how this is going to work. All the watermarking patterns I've ever seen that approached robustness in decoding have been altogether too easy to detect visually.
There is also a secondary problem with this as well. Unlike the Bee Tagg system, where there is a clear 'call to action' in the form of an identifiable visual tag, the DigiMarc system provides no visual clues that the image is a link.
From the point of view of the end user, I'm not going to pay it much attention as I would if there a clear indication that I can interact with the image.
Having to support the image with text instructions would be beside the point. Once a user is used to the idea that a tag leads to some form of interaction, it becomes part of the users intuition. He/she would only need to learn this once. Whereas, I cannot see it being a part of the normal user pattern to simply take pictures to fulfil an interaction.
I can imagine the senario where a person starts to take pictures at a magazine stand only to be told off.
Having said that, I intend to contact DigiMarc to beta test this myself. I envisage taking pictures of this months' playperson centerfold and sending it off to see what sort of interaction I'd get back : )
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