Mobile barcodes and tourism, together at last


3GVision is one of the global players when it comes to mobile barcodes – and it has announced a new service enabling guided phone tours in Glasgow. The trial service allows phone owners to download tours of the city direct to their phones.

What’s this now?

The Mackintosh Heritage Group (MHG) is dedicated to preserving and publicising the works of the great Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It has created three tours detailing the “great architectural works” of Glasgow. Over the next few days, the MHG will be distributing cards to the three particular Mackintosh attractions in Glasgow. These cards will contain details about the tours, as well as the QR code that the mobile owner has to scan to download the tour. Once they scan the code, it automatically downloads the tour they want as a PDF, which the user can load up on the phone and follow at their leisure.

The three 90-minute tours have been created with the assistance of writer and architectural historian Gavin Stamp.

Stuart Robertson, Chair of the Mackintosh Heritage Group said, “People are often unaware of the history and artistry that surrounds them. By delivering these tours directly into people’s hands we can help them discover the legacy of Mackintosh and other great Glasgow architects.”

What we think?

I have to confess that the actual tour here isn’t exactly dynamite – but it is just a trial, so it’s the machinery we’re more interested in than the tour itself (unless you’re genuinely interested in the works of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, in which case this would be awesome). The actual service on offer here is particularly cool, if you ask me. It’s a pretty low cost service, and it allows the tourist to access a lot information at the speed they’re comfortable with. The question is whether or not it’s cheaper to just have someone there who hands out printed maps?