December 12, 2014
An engineering team led by an Iranian-American professor in Connecticut has found that adding an array of tiny lenses to an ordinary smartphone allows one to securely display three-dimensional (3D) images and store data by simply scanning a series of Quick Response (QR) codes—without accessing the internet.
QR codes—symbols that appear on signs, posters and even business cards—are a convenient and efficient way of accessing specific web pages with a smartphone or other mobile devices.
The new data storage and display scheme can has implications for personal 3D entertainment, product visualizations for manufacturing and marketing and secure 3D data storage and transmission.
“We have developed a method of using QR codes along with smartphones to enable encrypted 3D information to be securely displayed on mobile devices,” said Bahram Javidi, project team leader from the University of Connecticut.
“The QR codes we developed store compressed and encrypted images, which can be easily scanned, decrypted, and decompressed by commercial smartphones for secure 3D visual communication,” he said.
The engineers also addressed an intrinsic security flaw with QR codes.
Currently, if a link to a website is stored in the QR code, a smartphone will automatically link to that website and access the data stored there, but that website may contain malicious programming.
“In the new method, we store self-contained slices of data in the QR codes themselves. It is then possible to receive and visualize 3D images without using the Internet,” Javidi said.
The team believes this is a highly secure method for data transfer.
The research was published in The Optical Society’s journal Optica.