Smart graves: Can modern technology replace traditional headstones? [video]

I've never really got why people want gravestones. They're obviously very important to some, to have place to go where people can contemplate that sort of thing, but to be remembered in the long-term as nothing more than a name taking up space seems very sad.

There's a place where my family scatter our ashes, I don't know when it started but both the grandparents I knew are there. We go there after the funeral and plant a tree or a shrub or some flowers, whatever the person liked in life, and scatter the ashes. Some of them get carried off, others fall into the earth. For all I know there's probably nothing beyond this life, it feels right, like they're being freed to be part of the wind and the trees; the song of some greater existence. I've always found it more emotional than the actual funerals.

The last time we went there was for my grandfather, we planted a small tree alongside my grandmother's.

Bah! One of the problems with headstone engravings is they erode and become unreadable. This really doesn't help amateur genealogists like myself unless the code is woven deep in to the stone with a sufficiently redundant encoding.

I'm more worried about the potential lack of reliable, public records in the future, given that the likes of the UK government want to do away with the national census altogether and rely on a hodge-podge of semi-private records. Most people alive in the UK today will be cremated anyway.

Not to mention, if this catches on, we'll likely end up with fields of stones that look like ass with no sense of majesty.

Another interesting problem is QR codes are not human readable and are almost exclusively used by advertisers. So there is a reluctance to scanning a QR code. I am fairly certain that this will eventually mostly be used for advertising, $1000 for a headstone without a QR code or $900 for a headstone 90% of the surface covered by a QR code linking to a targeted offer. You could argue that historically gravestones have been used for advertising, just rather low key like a small amount of religious or occasionally political commentary / quote.

This will of course be followed up by interesting defacement reports, see you chip away here and sharpie marker there and next thing you know this gravestone points to some shock site; goatse perhaps or more appropriately given the deceased maybe a gore-site.

I'm not sure if this will work correctly, but give this URL a try:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=400x400&chl=Mi...

If it works, its a demonstration of how arbitrary headstone text can be encoded into a QR code without a URL subscription middleman.

The content in this example is making fun of MS Tag codes, an embrace/extend/extinguish version of QR codes that extinguished itself after about 8 years rather than extinguishing QR codes, although QR codes are extinguishing themselves pretty well without MS's help.

I can imagine a lot of 404 errors in the future.

The trick is convincing grieving family members to commit to a QR code encoding a URL to a subscription pay site rather than a simple text mode QR code. The snow job by middlemen has been good enough that some people are amazed that QR codes can encode anything other than a URL.

This kind of small vandalism will rapidly pass. There is no need, given a smartphone with a compass, camera, and GPS, to use a "bar code" for this kind of stupidly simple AR application.

Merely point your phone at the headstone and if there's metadata, you'll get it.

On the bright side, they're using QR codes and not microsoft tag codes, which are being discontinued serverside in about 18 months.

I thought it was normal to put a URL on a gravestone these days. Basically it's the same as an email signature.

Now all I need is an app that will keep posting cat pictures to social media for me after I'm dead.

I highly doubt that anyone will allow such ugly looking tombstones in their graveyard any time soon.

Oh look ma, vanity even in the grave. If strangers have a reason to know who you were, they will.

I can't say I'm excited about this...

Vandalizing these idiotic tombstones will be great sport, and guilt-free.

I thought we had an understanding with the great beyond, that the living only take heed when communication is conveyed in the form of plagues or nightmares?

Montezuma's revenge isn't a pop-up window that reads "click here". The curse of The Mummy isn't a flash animation. Ebenezer Scrooge didn't turn over a new leaf after taking an online survey.

I mean sure, we may read their pithy stone carvings, but we certainly aren't compelled to obey them. Why would the dead place their trust in the availability of a civilian internet, to convey their message?