The city council has chosen to use the barcodes to help people to find more information with their smartphones.
The West Berkshire Council has just introduced a new use for QR codes within their city, which will allow people to look into planning applications for the streets by simply scanning the barcodes using their smartphones.
These on street barcodes will be prominently displayed on the planning application notices.
The city has already been posting the planning application notices that are bright orange in color, to help people to be able to see that there are intentions to make changes in a certain location. Now those notices will also include QR codes which will allow passers-by to be able to gain a larger amount of information than would fit on the poster.
The QR codes lead a person using a smartphone or other mobile device directly to the plan details.
Scanning the QR codes directs the user to a webpage with the full details of the plans for the location. Any mobile device with an appropriate barcode reader app can be used to scan. At the moment, it is estimated that approximately half of the population has smartphones that are capable of supporting this type of app, and this number is increasing. Most of these applications are free.
Not long after a planning application has received its validation, the council website will post the details of that and any other documents that are associated with it. A QR code will then be added to the posted notice on the street itself, which will provide mobile device users with a direct access to that information, which has already been added to the council website.
The QR codes that are used aren’t simply general barcodes for the site itself, but are unique and specific to the project at the location where it is being scanned. This means that scanning the barcode will lead the device user directly to that specific planning project and not just to a homepage.
As many apps for QR codes also allow the user to save the data related to the scan in their “history”, this also gives individuals the chance to transfer the webpage information to a laptop or PC later on for easier viewing.
