Sticker Machines Try for Comeback With Video
If you were a teenager in the nineties, there's a good chance you remember sticker machines. Those terminals in game arcades that snapped a photo of you and produced a sheet of stickers for you to give to your friends. A Japanese company is hoping for a come-back with a version that also produces a short video message to share with friends.
Just like the original machines, the QR Studio will snap a picture of its user and produce a sheet of stickers. But there's something else. Before it takes your picture it will record a 15 second video.
Of course you can't print out a video on a sticker sheet so the terminal does the next best thing. It prints out a two-dimensional barcode called a QR code within which is encoded a URL to a copy of the video on an Internet-attached server.
Just about every modern cell phone in Japan contains a QR code reader so with just a few clicks, friends and associates can be downloading and then watching the video. The QCIF (177 pixel by 144 pixel) resolution file is provided as a 3GP video file so it can also be forwarded to a PC and played back with software such as Quicktime.
