QR Codes are a fantastic idea. Mostly. And yes, I’m talking about a technology that has been around for quite some time and it really didn’t take off outside of Japan, but go with me on this.

I know that you lot would have seen them before and dismissed them as futuristic ideas that will never work on TV shows alongside beliefs that we will have flying cars and robot housemaids, but strangely, two-dimensional barcodes that can be read by modern mobile handsets and actually have uses.

The main use is, as everyone probably already knows about, for mobile websites. Cans of Pepsi here in the UK have these codes plastered onto the side, allowing you to waste lots of your phone contract’s data allowance seeing effectively an advert for a soft drink.
Some generator sites will even allow you to use QR Codes to show a plain-text message, for example “Put that phone away and get back to work”.
The Pet Shop Boys have even decked out a music video with tons of QR Codes. Odd, but that’s what we expect.

But my current favourite use for QR Codes has to be the supplemental content for adult magazines, as seen in Japan. The great Danny Choo has, whilst going for a medical check-up, taken some photos of this phenomenon which charges the user a high rate for each photo they see. Of course the photo consists of an altered form of the magazine, usually where the subject wears less clothing, and this does seem to be quite a good monetizing effort. It also means that the magazine itself, despite being adult in nature, has the most mundane photos inside, rendering it relatively safe to look at in public. Although weird…

I’m sure that everyone in the world has tried Google Maps and loved to zoom in on streets to see their car on their driveway. But what if you could do that to photographs?

No, I’m not talking about normal photos of people posing. I mean of panoramas, such as of a group of skyscrapers. With people inside.

Well, apparently it’s all doable, thanks to Gigapixelphotography.com. They’ve somehow managed to take a really high resolution shot of some buildings in Vancouver, put it onto a page powered by Flickr and allowed people to zoom around it in the vain hope of seeing someone in a window wearing just a towel.
It seems to be working in a similar way to Google Maps, by making the image into tiles at various levels of detail and then only loading those that are needed. I dread to think what the full size image’s resolution and file size would be.

Sadly, it’s down thanks to a massive audience, but I would guess it will be up again once the people at Digg have left it alone…

[Via Digg]