Bookmarking The Most Beautiful Places In The World With QR Codes

Imagine you’ve just spotted a coffee table book that features some of the most amazingly beautiful places on earth. You are dying to go to all these places because not only are they full of cultural diversity but nature is biased in blessing them. So, you get the book and a year down the road, you are ready for the book but your spouse announces that he or she left the book behind during the big move to your new home. Egad! Do you want to spend more money just to get the same book or should you chance a look around on the Internet?

Now, how about something different?

Travelers sometimes have to rely on travel guides to find interesting places to visit in a foreign country and the problems only increase in magnitude with prominent use of local languages. Even without QR Codes, mobile technology is already being used to locate places in a foreign country via Google Maps. So, how is the QR Code going to make a difference?

That’s where the newly released book ‘Earthbound: A Rough Guide to the world in pictures’ comes in. It costs right about USD$30 per book (depending on where you are purchasing this book from) and there are more than three-hundred pages (paperback) worth of beautiful recommended destinations to visit in many countries from all around the world. With each of the picture, there are comments to help you decide whether this is the place you want to go and the commentary comes from the photographer him or herself.

Doesn’t sound any different from other picturesque books out there in the market today? That is true if you miss the quaint little black and white box sitting there in the corner. It is a QR Code. The QR Code leads you to Google Maps, point you in the right direction where you can instantly use it to find your way there. While the idea is fantastic, some technology experts who have already tested the QR Codes out found that there are some minor glitches when you try to scan the QR Codes with an older model of smart phone.

The main problem with the QR Code is this; it is a coffee table book hence, priority is given to the nice pictures that the photographers have taken and little space is given to the QR Code. Hence, it compromises on the effectiveness of the QR Codes. However, if it is bigger, it works. The problem lies in installation of a QR Code reader and the camera phone being unable to focus on an object too close to the camera lens.

What is interesting to us, however, is not the fact that there is a QR Code. We are more interested in the fact that once scanned, the QR Code location can be saved into your mobile phone. If and when you are within vicinity of the said ‘beautiful place’, you can instantly open it up and find it again.

There you go…mobile bookmarking via QR Codes. It’s incredible that we can now link the offline world (the book and the destination) to an online world (internet and mobile phones).