Humayun's Tomb in Delhi, Khajuraho group of monuments in Madhya Pradesh and the Ajanta and Ellora caves in Maharashtra will have a unique commonness in the days to come. These structures would be embedded with bar codes to provide complete information and details about their historicity.
Pointing a cellphone at that facet or building would enable the tourist get information about it. But tourists should have downloaded the application to their smartphones or tablets that photographs the icon. The mixture of technology and tradition has been planned by the Tourism Ministry. The first two-dimensional bar codes, or QR (Quick Response) codes, as they are popularly are being installed at Humayun's Tomb. Aga Khan Trust is working with Ministry of Tourism to install these QR codes on almost all facet of the ancient monument by mid- September.
"The idea is that you point your cell-phone at that facet or building and you get free information about it. The phone app then reads the code and gives information about the relic," said an official from the Ministry of Tourism. "Once that is done, we plan to take the project to Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh. In the next level, we plan to bar code monuments in Gujarat, Orissa and Kerala. like Sao Paolo was the world's first QR city, we plan to make India, the first QR coded country," said the tourism official.
The QR Code system - consists of black modules (square dots) arranged in a square grid on a white background - can be easily read by an imaging device (such as a camera) and processed until the image can be interpreted. It was first used in the automotive industry due to its fast readability and greater storage capacity compared to the UPC barcodes which gives limited information.
Sao Paulo in Brazil was the world's first city to use QR codes on most of its heritage structures. Following the success of which, Rio de Janerio also installed 30 of these QR codes at beaches, vistas, and historic sites, so as to help Rio's approximately 2 million foreign visitors learn about the city as they walked around. Some very popular tourist sites in Portugal and New York have also adopted this technology, still finding its ground in the tourism sector.