I saw this on my breakfast cereal box (in the US) and looked it up. A company called Navilens made this to help visually impaired people with things like street signs, etc… neat!
EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I forgot I am on lemmy so we’re discussing the technology and licensing issues, instead of focusing on how this might improve the lives of visually impaired people.
Of course, but QR codes work when the server of the company that printed them goes down. If cloud.navilens.com ever goes down, every single code they generated will be broken forever.
And this is virtually guaranteed to happen before too long, leaving tons of useless technicolor QR codes as monuments to the endeavor.
I don’t know how the company is doing, but I do find it strange how large their team is (based on their website) for a service selling QR codes.
Then again, they do seem to have received government/EU grants, so perhaps they’ll be able to stick around that way. If the company does go down, there’s no reason why they couldn’t release a database of every (last known) data point so you can use the app offline for the codes that have stuck around.
A graceful shutdown is possible, and in my opinion, should be contractually obligated under escrow for a company to receive public funds like this.
You point out the key weakness to the whole approach (dependency on a single third party). Though I suspect that the content in question is also hosted by NaviLens, so the codes would still stop working if they ever shut down.
Just taking a look at their website, it seems to me that NaviLens’ value proposition isn’t just “codes that download a document”, but an entire framework for building and presenting essential documentation in a way that is accessible to people with vision impairments. I can see why it would be cheaper and more effective for a city to buy a service like this than to hire their own software developers and accessibility experts to build out their own bespoke system.
It certainly beats an independent system for every single city or service, but the chosen design limits the functionality of the tags once the service shuts down. You can’t archive the codes, and you can’t generate your own like you can with QR codes.
Had they color-coded their own special ID around a normal QR code with a URL, I wouldn’t have had as much of an issue with these. They actually do have such a system, but they advertise it as an alternative rather than the default.
QR codes wouldn’t solve this problem, because they would still house a link that has to be opened in the NaviLens app to be of any use.
These codes don’t just take you to some static document. It opens up in the NaviLens app, which when use features like the gps, gyro, and camera in your phone to provide more rich, contextual information.
They provide a QR+ Navi combination that solves exactly that. When the company goes bankrupt (or gets bought out by Google and shut down), the city can still provide useful information. You can get Navi codes with a fallback URL for non-Navi scanners.
GPS+gyro+camera access can be done by an (archivable) web application as well, but I suppose Navi is incentivised to not offer any non-app fallback so they can charge a subscription for their services.