ShotCode
type of barcode
ShotCode is a circular barcode created by High Energy Magic of Cambridge University. It uses a dartboard-like circle, with a bullseye in the centre and datacircles surrounding it. The technology reads databits from the datacircles by measuring the angle and distance from the bullseye for each point.
ShotCodes are designed to be read with a regular camera (including those found on mobile phones and webcams) without the need to purchase other specialised hardware. ShotCodes differ from matrix barcodes in that they do not store regular data - rather, they store a look up number consisting of 40 bits of data. This needs to link to a server that holds information regarding a mapped URL which the reading device can connect to in order to download said data.
History
ShotCode was created in 1999 at the University of Cambridge when researching a low cost vision based method to track locations and developed TRIPCode as a result. It has been used to track printed TRIPCode paperbadges in realtime with webcams. After that in Cambridge it had another research use; to read barcodes with mobile phone cameras, and they used TRIPCode in a round barcode which was named SpotCode. High Energy Magic was founded in 2003 to commercialise research from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and Laboratory for Communications Engineering.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2280073. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1999 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “ShotCode” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.