The initial concept was to create a jigsaw puzzle game you can play by scanning barcodes in a certain sequence. The idea was to give a sneak preview of a part of an image(“a puzzle piece”) by scanning a single barcode, and have people piece together the whole image.
To generate the barcodes that correspond to the pieces of an image, we converted an image to ascii code (pixel shade -> char), and split the ascii into strings that were encoded into barcodes for printing, using code-128. Ideally the order of the image pieces will be scrambled. The video shows how the barcode scanning in a specific order reconstructs the whole image.
We thought of various ways of revealing the image pieces encoded in the barcodes. Right now the program continuously appends the decoded image piece from left to right, top to bottom. Another way is to show the most recently scanned image piece on a ‘clue’ canvas, and have parts of the image only revealed on an ‘puzzle’ canvas when two adjacent puzzle pieces were scanned one after the other.
This interaction concept could be expanded to create a drawing tool. The barcode scanner would act as a paintbrush, and the sequences of barcodes would act as a palette. Scanning certain barcodes in a specific order would create unique image patterns, gradients, or edges, which could be combined to paint a picture.