Japanese mapping company Alps Corporation will launch on the 16th of January a collection of small street atlas for the Tokyo, Fukushima, Niigata, and Nagano prefectures. Their particularity will be to host a QR code on some of its “area close-up” pages.

When decrypted by means of a mobile phone equipped with a camera, will reveal a URL linking to a webpage full of updated gourmet or lodging informations for the given areas. Users who do not have means to decrypt the 2D barcode will be able to push in the URL by hand into their internet enabled phone and access the same services.
Alps Corporation show that they understand the potential of this technology and i can imagine seeing their next maps in years to come incorporating QR codes up to the building level. Those codes wouldn’t necessarily need to link to a webpage as they can contain quite of bit of encoded info on their own. And of course, this wouldn’t be fun without some mobile phone + GPS pedestrian street navigation services (described in more details here).