Track your beer with a QR code

Originally invented by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave back in 1994 to track vehicles during manufacturing, the QR code has now become popular outside the automobile industry thanks to the prevalence of intelligent handheld devices such as smart phones equipped with inexpensive image sensors.

One of the latest companies to use the code in a rather innovative way is the US beer giant Anheuser-Busch. It has recently started to print the QR codes on Budweiser packaging to allow consumers to trace the origins of the beer they hold in their hands back to one of the company's 12 US breweries.

Yes, that's right. By using a smart phone equipped with a free "Track Your Bud" app, beer drinkers across the US can now scan the QR code on their Budweisers, enter the "Born On" date found on bottles and cans, and be taken on a guided tour of the creation of their individual beer by the Budweiser brewmaster responsible for it.


The "Track Your Bud" app provides beer drinkers with an insight into the source and selection of ingredients for the beer, Budweiser's seven-step brewing process, when their beer began beechwood aging and which brewmaster tasted it multiple times throughout its brew cycle to ensure it met Budweiser's standards.

"Track Your Bud also gives consumers insight into where Budweiser's raw materials come from -- including barley farms in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin; and hops farms in Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and Germany," says Jane Killebrew-Galeski, director of brewing, quality, and innovation for Anheuser-Busch.

While the inventors of the QR code may never have dreamt that the technology that they developed all those years ago would ever be put to such innovative uses, this is clearly the wave of the future.

Indeed, I can't wait until the day when all companies follow the responsible lead set by the US brewing giant. Enabling consumers to trace the origins of the products they purchase directly back to the specific individuals at the company that made them will allow them to see exactly who to contact should anything go wrong.

For more information about the new Budweiser "Track Your Bud" program, check out www.TrackYourBud.com or download the app.

Bottoms up!

Vision Systems Design: The Swimsuit Issue, Part 2

Hard on the heels of the fascinating revelations in last week's blog (Vision Systems Design: The Swimsuit Issue) comes the news that the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has once again employed some rather nifty imaging technology to bring more life to the swimsuit models featured on its pages.

For the second year in a row, the publisher has digitally watermarked photos of the scantily clad ladies in its issue using Digimarc's (Beaverton OR, USA) digital watermarking technology. For those of you who may not know, this digital watermarking technique embeds an imperceptible pattern into the image that can be detected by a smart phone but not by the human eye.

Unlike a QR code, these watermarks have the advantage that they do not cover a part of an image or ruin the design of the pages of the swimsuit issue -- a move which I'm sure would upset many of the magazine's readers if they did.

To launch the behind-the-scenes videos of the nineteen different swimsuit models, users simply need to use a mobile swimsuit viewer app -- available for iPhone, iPad, and Android -- which then enables such devices to detect the digitally watermarked photos and launch the videos associated with them.

The swimsuit viewer mobile app and video delivery process were built and are managed by Nellymoser (Arlington, MA, USA) -- a mobile marketing and technology services company. The app and video are powered by Nellymoser's "mobile engagement platform," which enables digital content to be presented across desktops, tablets, and phones.

While the development of such a watermark image encoder and reader app might seem somewhat trivial to those of us in design and manufacturing, it is in fact high-volume applications such as these that may ultimately drive down the cost of the technology, allowing it to be used by all sorts of folks in industrial marketing too.

Having said that, enabling a user to launch an interactive video of a machine vision system for automating the process of de-boning lamb carcasses or removing the internal organs of animals such as cows or pigs from a promotional flyer distributed at a trade show might be taking things a little too far.