End of gap between physical and virtual

Just before Christmas, the French company Violet released Mir:ror (see also Tony's posting about this). And because blogging about trends is the perfect excuse to buy things you actually don't need, I decided to try this new gadget. Mir:ror is a so called general purpose RFID-reader.

We blogged in other posts about RFID, small identification chips that can be used in all kinds of objects. Violet puts these RFID-chips in little rabbits (I have orange and yellow ones, isn't that cute?) and in stamps (or Ztamp:s as Violet names them). The idea is that you can associate each unique rabbit or stamp with a specific action. If you place one of these items close to the Mir:ror, that specific action will be executed. For example, if I wave my yellow rabbit above the mirror, I will be connected immediately to my corporate homepage. Or you could glue a stamp to a document and associate that document to a specific online dossier. Each of the actions is counted, so it is also possible to play with this: place a stamp in your medicine box so you can count the times you use the box and send this information automatically to an online service. So far the theory. In reality, the software crashes so many times that often the action is not executed and it is quicker to perform the task by clicking than by waving rabbits (although these actions start many funny office conversations). A competitive product was introduced by Alcatal-Lucent and is called tikitag, their reader is less pretty though...

But are RFID tags really convenient to connect physical objects with online actions? Another approach is the use of bar codes. Instead of using chips, you could create unique codes and associate an action with them. Then you can print the codes and each time you scan the code, the chosen action will be performed. Scanning could be done by mobile phone or the camera in your laptop. The Ricoh Innovation labs released iCandy, an application with which you can create codes and put them on cards or other objects. You can associate codes with iTunes songs or websites. If you scan the code, the specific iTune song will start automatically or routes you to the shop to buy the song if you don't own it. Bands can use iCandy for promotion purposes by creating cards with bar codes. Then these cards are the bridge between performance venues and the MySpace page of the band. Everyone needs a physical reminder, also in the digital age. And if something sounds promising you can be sure that Microsoft also enters the arena. Their research labs released a beta of Microsoft Tags. Their tags with small triangles use three colours, so you need colour printing, the advantage is that their codes are smaller compared to the black/white standards. The video below shows the concept and possibilities, comparable to those of iCandy.

The question is: what will be the standard, because adoption will require that we all install some kind of application that understands the tags (by reading RFID chips or scanning bar codes). For linking physical objects with digital actions, my bets are on the bar codes (for other purposes, the RFID chips are still valuable). What do you think?