ITEE Innovation Expo 2008 : Project Details

Real-Time Mobile Phone Bar Code Reader

Over the past decade mobile phones have seen not only a rise in their popularity but also the technical abilities offered by the handsets. Mobile phones portability opens the way for features that are not suited to a typical PC such as digital cameras, GPS navigation or portable media players. With an estimated subscription base of 3.3 billion users, half the world’s population, mobile phones provide a new and exciting platform for developers to utilise with the capability to develop applications that would otherwise not be suited to the desktop computer.

ScanIt is a mobile application designed to leverage these capabilities through the development of a network aware barcode scanner. Designed for Nokia smart phones making use of the Symbian OS, ScanIt allows a user to capture a barcode of a product using the phones camera and have it decoded and recognised by the application. The user then has the ability to view content relating to the scanned product ranging from reviews, specifications, features or any other information that is available via the online database that the phone uses to retrieve the information. Through the use of the mobile phones web browser a user is able to view not only text but multimedia relating to the scanned product such as movies or audio clips.