I've always wished that you could get a separate IR channel in phone cameras. Combine this with IR ink or IR channels on video feeds and you've got invisible QR codes. I suspect there's huge potential for being able to point your phone at content and have it magically link to data about the product / show / ad / event / whatever.
Phone cameras can see in IR. A classic trick to test if your TV remote is working is to look at the LED through a digital camera while pressing a button. Try it right now if you don't believe me.
What's missing is screens which can display meta information in the IR channel. I say we call the image format IRGB.
More generally, this problem is called Optical Camera Communication (OCC).
One of the more interesting things you can do is to exploit the rolling shutter readout method of consumer CMOS sensors to recover information with a high temporal resolution. By modulating the backlight of a video display or any other kind of wide-area light, you can transmit information optically to the phone in a way that's invisible to the user.
I'm not aware of any commercial applications of such tech, but there are enough keywords in this post to find a few research papers on the topic.
A big part of the problem is separating food vs non-food containers made with the same plastic - this tech can help with that by identifying the use even after the label has been removed and the package partially crushed.
The fundamental challenge here is creating a market.
If governments pay for recycling then they have the incentive to change it, but no easy levers to pull to make those changes.
If they instead just bill the producers of the packaging for the cost of recycling or landfill then there's an instant incentive for the people making the packaging to reduce, reuse and recycle more.
Then multiple ingenious ideas like this can fight it out in the market.
Very similar to my take on carbon taxes. We have the tech, but not the market to enable it to be deployed and developed further.
The project is called "Holy Grail", and the plastic embossing with the 'invisible barcodes' seems to be the cleverest part. Does anyone have experience with this sort of technology (using or developing)?
What I came with: take 8 fluorescent dies with machine distinguishable fluorescence wavelengths, then you use them to code plastics. 2^8=256 enough for all common materials
There's no point in recycling most things curbside. Even in the places where the garbagemen don't grab the recycling bins and toss them in with the landfill trash, the things that curbside recycling takes are easier, cheaper, and better to just make new.
[+] [-] shaftway|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IIAOPSW|6 years ago|reply
What's missing is screens which can display meta information in the IR channel. I say we call the image format IRGB.
[+] [-] neetdeth|6 years ago|reply
One of the more interesting things you can do is to exploit the rolling shutter readout method of consumer CMOS sensors to recover information with a high temporal resolution. By modulating the backlight of a video display or any other kind of wide-area light, you can transmit information optically to the phone in a way that's invisible to the user.
I'm not aware of any commercial applications of such tech, but there are enough keywords in this post to find a few research papers on the topic.
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|6 years ago|reply
i.e. that the problem with recycling isn't in identifying the plastic, it's in separating and cleaning it?
Plus recycling plastic is pointless - it's environmentally better to burn plastic for energy.
[+] [-] Solitude042|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] birdyrooster|6 years ago|reply
Source please? This seems very counter intuitive.
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|6 years ago|reply
If governments pay for recycling then they have the incentive to change it, but no easy levers to pull to make those changes.
If they instead just bill the producers of the packaging for the cost of recycling or landfill then there's an instant incentive for the people making the packaging to reduce, reuse and recycle more.
Then multiple ingenious ideas like this can fight it out in the market.
Very similar to my take on carbon taxes. We have the tech, but not the market to enable it to be deployed and developed further.
[+] [-] dpflan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coolspot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
It's not like it's steel, or lead-acid batteries.