DataGlyphs

I recently saw a very cool technology, it is called 'DataGlyphs' from PARC (or Palo Alto Research Center, and formerly known as Xerox PARC). DataGlyphs are 45-degree diagonal lines that can be as small as one one-hundredth of an inch or less. Each glyph is designed to represents a single binary number (such as: '0' or '1'), depending on whether it slopes to the left or right. The main limitation to the size of the glyph is the resolution of the printer and scanner used to print it and to read it, the higher the resolution of these devices the smaller the glyph can be.

One of the cool things about this technology is that you can embed binary information into images, create special watermarks, etc...; and people might not even realize that they're there. Another great thing about the technology is that it has a lot of built-in error correction so that you should be able to crumble, burn holes, spill coffee, etc.. on the page; and the software should still be able to decode the message.

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