UV Barcodes
June 4, 2008 5:34 pm Barcode Printing, Barcode ScanningI had someone ask me an interesting question today, and I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t know the answer. But thankfully my friends at Barcoding Inc. did. Someone contacted me because they were looking for a UPC code that could be printed on paper and read by a barcode scanner, but couldn’t be viewed by the naked eye. Sounds a little like sci-fi huh? Invisible ink? But there actually is such a thing, it’s called an Ultra Violet Barcode or UV Barcode. My friend Kevin Berisso, Director of the AIDC Lab at Ohio University has helped me out by providing more information about UV Barcodes, read more HERE.
Kevin Berisso :
Date: July 16, 2008 @ 9:11 am
What the good people at barcode.com are refering to is the substitution of regular black (or whatever color you want) ink with a UV based ink that is only visible with a blacklight. Packaging and corragate companies have been using this for a while to allow them to print information on the package or corragate that is not visible to the end user. By far, I would have to say this is the easiest and cheapest solution.
However there is a company that went a bit further with this concept. I can’t remember the name at the moment, but they developed a near-infra-red (ir) transparent paint that allowed someone to print a bar code (or really do anything including write on the item with a marker) and then paint over it. The paint only allowed some wavelenghts of light through and as a result you could “see” through the paint with the scanner, but not the human eye. If I can find the company again, I will report it.
Another option out there that is not real cheap is NASA’s magneto-optical imager (MOI) which allows you to read through regular paint or other non-ferrous coatings. By using a special ink the system is able to view the magnetic fields of where the paint is.