viz.

Image Credit: Screen capture of a powerpoint from my E314 course

For my final viz post of the semester (I'm officially off duty in the spring, but might pop back in occasionally), I'm going to reflect back on one of the more pedagogically interesting technologies I've discussed this semester -- using QR codes in the classroom. 

At the Blanton Museum of Art, one side of the Greek and Roman sculpture room looks like this:

Image Credit: Marjorie Foley at Blanton

A beginning student's analysis of this room might argue that Romans like Cicero (top left of image) were austere, honorable, and very different from people today. Or the analysis might argue that the curator, at least, wanted the viewer to believe those things. And while it's true that this room may have been set up to suggest such Greek and Roman qualities to the average museum-goer, outside knowledge, like the fact that these ancient sculptures were often painted, can complicate analyses of rhetoric at the museum.

Image Credit: Eric Rice's Flickr

H/T : 2D Code Blog and Hampton for the QR reader demonstration

In anticipation of Viz Blog's upcoming collaboration with the DWRL Immersive Environments Group, I'm devoting this week's post to a bit of background on QR codes - two dimensional barcodes that can contain several different types of data: URLs, a limited number of plain text characters, phone numbers, or SMS. In the image above, Eric Rice's "nerdscaping" of his driveway has been captured from space by Google's satellite view. Although the code wasn't quite completed when the photograph was taken, Rice's project will inevitably be only one of many giant QR codes that will soon appear on satellite images. Driveways, yards, parking lots, and building rooftops are all spaces where these codes can be placed to embed information on specific locations in the real world.