Very little is sold for the American home -- from food to kitchen cleansers to cosmetics -- that does not bear a bar code, that striped marking that, when scanned, yields a number that allows the checkout register to identify an item and its price.
As digital devices get smaller and smarter, electronics makers are looking to scanning technology to do everything from opening Internet sites to enabling refrigerators to reorder food when supplies run low.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Meanwhile, bar codes are finding a place in electronic toys and computer games. Among the first, arriving in September, is a hand-held fantasy game called Skannerz, developed by a Dallas-based company, Radica. Intended for children 7 and older, the device is a virtual monster capture and combat game. Once the monsters are "trapped" in the device, they can be viewed on a tiny LCD screen and pitted against one another.
The trick is getting the monsters into the machine. That is accomplished by passing the device's built-in scanner over any bar code, which often may yield signs of life. A program embedded in the device will transform the information received from the bar code into one of an array of monsters, sometimes friendly and sometimes hostile and ready for battle. Scannerz uses three AAA batteries and is expected to sell for US$19.
More elaborate is Knowledge Adventure's ScanCommand: A Jurassic Park III Game, a CD-ROM computer game based on the latest Jurassic Park movie. The game, due in October, features richly detailed graphics, an assortment of dinosaurs (including velociraptors and spinosaurs) and five children who desperately need to be rescued.
But what sets ScanCommand apart from the crowded field of dino-videogames is its use of bar codes to rev up the terrible lizards' strength, speed, intelligence and other winning qualities. A bar code scanner, about the size of a television remote control, is included and connects to a personal computer's serial port.
Once a bar code is scanned and loaded into the game, the program turns it into dinosaur DNA, which is represented as a sort of puzzle piece on the screen, a kind of game within a game. Once the puzzle is assembled by the player, the qualities are transferred to his dinosaur.
Part of the fun, said Robert Nashak, executive producer for Vivendi Universal, of which Knowledge Adventure is a division, is figuring out which bar codes yield which qualities. Some bar codes are worthless, but most will yield some kind of DNA. Some can make the difference between a dinosaur's becoming predator or prey.
To make it more interesting, he said, Knowledge Adventure will make some special bar codes available only on the Internet for downloading and scanning.
Nashak said that the game, which will sell for about US$50 and is aimed at children 8 and older, had no commercial tie-in to products that might end up bearing some of the most sought-after bar codes.
"You don't even have to buy anything to scan these codes," he said, noting that the user could simply browse the supermarket shelves in search of codes that might yield the most prized dinosaur qualities. The battery-powered scanner can hold up to 25 scans and can also be attached to another game scanner so players can trade dinosaur DNA.
The game requires Windows 95, 98 or 2000 and a graphics accelerator card.
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