Now the living who want to find out more about the dead simply have to swipe a smartphone or iPad over those gravestones at a cemetery: QR Code scans on headstones or markers now give information about the deceased--including photos and video of the dead. Quiring Monuments in Seattle, Washington, makes scanning technology available for just sixty-five bucks.
Some find it creepy, others find it an incredible way to use technology.
QR Codes now appear in magazines and virtually everywhere--but never before on cemetery tombstones. Quiring Monuments is now making it possible for future generations, and family and loved ones here now, to read, write, view or share information about a person, the life they lived--and the things they loved while here on earth.
'QR Code' -- otherwise known as quick-response codes and functioning similarly to a bar code -- consist of a tiny square of code the size of a postage stamp. Wave a smartphone or iPad over the codes to get instant info to companies or about products. Now there's the idea to link to volumes of info about a specific person's life. Using a phone to scan the code on a gravestone will pop up information about the person while they were alive and even photographs and videos -- in what is a sort of living memoir.
Users are taken to a website with the deceased person's written history, photos and videos as provided by the family or loved ones, and can now be considered part of a headstone purchase. Right now, there's one company specifically that offers the special technological headstones: Seattle's Quiring Monuments in Washington, which made "living headstones" available in Spring of 2011. Quiring Monuments has sold about 35 or so thus far.
Adding a QR Code to a cemetery headstone only costs about $65 dollars, a unique way to pay tribute to loved ones.
For families that include men and women whom have dedicated their lives to the military or with the government, it can provide even more insight for visitors -- to learn about the people no longer here, and for those interested to learn their stories. Last month Quiring Monuments included QR Codes at the grave sites or on gravestones of eight -- six Medal of Honor recipients and two Silver Star recipients at Seattle's Evergreen Washelli Cemetery.
"What it means to me, it opens up the world to virtually anyone who is in our cemetery," says Washelli general manager Scott Sheehan. "Before, you might stand on a gravesite and read [a gravestone] and wonder what that [deceased] person was about. Now you can read their life story. Every life has a story. That's our tagline."
The 68-year-old president of Quiring Monuments, Dave Quiring, 68, has included QR codes on the headstones of own his parents. Quiring says family found a scrap of paper in his dad's wallet when he passed -- from Robert Frost: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep." The poem is now included on the gravestone for his father. And he says it brings him peace to read in what he calls a "marriage of technology with history seems a way to make preserving memories more important to people."
QR codes are affixed to headstones rather than inscribed -- so people can change their minds. And QR Codes aren't limited to tombstones: The codes can be affixed to mausoleums, cremation urns, garden benches, trees -- or virtually any place the person is memorialized.
And adding information about the deceased doesn't have to be limited to the family making arrangements: Loved ones can be provided passwords for the person who has died -- to add information, pictures and videos of the person whom has passed away.