A Clickable World

By now, most people know how to use a QR code. Once you have a reader installed on your mobile device, you just scan the code on a printed piece and it opens a website or a video, or brings some other pertinent data to your screen. It's an excellent way to link the printed and online worlds, and enhance the value of the printed piece.

One problem though: those QR codes are just plain ugly. Designers cringe at the thought of destroying their careful creations with clunky blocks of black bits.

True, there are other types of slightly more pleasant-looking matrix barcodes, like the Microsoft Tag, but wouldn't it be great if you didn't need a barcode at all? One in-plant has been testing such a technology and getting some great results.

University of Mississippi Printing and Graphic Services was chosen by Ricoh as part of a pilot program to test its not-yet-available Clickable Paper technology. Those who attended Graph Expo last fall may recall that Ricoh won a Must See 'Ems award for this image recognition technology, which lets users, armed with the free app, take a picture of a printed page (no code) and get a choice of multiple links to follow for additional information.

"It doesn't just get you to a landing page and you're stuck on that landing page," enthuses Tony Seaman, the recently retired director of Printing and Graphic Services at Ole Miss, in Oxford, Miss., "it gets you to a menu that you can go back and forth on."

Once an image is made "clickable" by the software, one need only point a mobile device at the image and click. The Clickable Paper app, called CP Clicker, opens a menu of six tabs, which can be links to websites, blog posts, social media, videos, etc. Unlike with QR codes, users can chose among several options, then return to the menu to check out the other choices.

So far, Seaman says, the in-plant has gone live with three projects using Clickable Paper. The Ole Miss logo, he reveals, is clickable, meaning that any version of the logo, no matter when it was printed, can be scanned. Users can then chose between links to Ole Miss news, sports, university history, the orientation program, etc.

Seaman foresees other uses for Clickable Paper at the university. Professors can make textbook pages clickable, linking students to related readings, homework assignments, Twitter feeds, videos and more.

How It Works

Clickable Paper utilizes an authoring tool to index printed material, creating "hotspots" and assigning the associated rich media content. When a user clicks on the image, the app on their mobile device sends a query to a cloud-based server, where it is analyzed and matched. Then the rich media links are returned to the requesting smartphone or tablet to be displayed within the Clickable Paper app.

Ricoh Innovations developed Ricoh Visual Search (RVS), the technology behind Clickable Paper. With Clickable Paper, not only is there no need to print an unsightly QR code on a piece, you can use a previously printed piece. Any type of document can be recognized, including text, figures, photographs or a combination of these. RVS can recognize low resolution images, enabling high-speed recognition. After Clickable Paper is available for sale, the iPhone and Android apps for smartphones and tablets will utilize RVS as a core component of the solution.

The technology is not without its challenges, though, acknowledges Seaman.

"The hardest part of this is going to be educating people to recognize that something's clickable," he points out. The in-plant is printing Ricoh's CP icon on clickable pages. Seaman has sent out an explanation of Clickable Paper to faculty and staff at Ole Miss, and several departments have expressed interest. Seaman sees great possibilities for the technology in a university setting.

"It's another value-add, and it's another way of reaching specific target audiences," he says.