I can honestly say that this is the first time in my life that I have been excited by a bar code. This isn’t the plain old bar code you find on your Wheaties, though. A company called Content Idea of Asia has come up with a 3D bar code. It is made up of up to 24 layers of color. So what? Well, the bar code can store between 0.6MB and 1.8MB of data.

Imagine this: Your phone has a scanner on it; using the free software, which Content Idea will provide, you scan the bar code and you can watch video stored in the code on your phone. That could bring a whole new dimension to ads in magazines. You don’t have to just drool over the picture of Jessica Simpson in the ad. Now you can watch her movie on the little screen in your pocket, too. There are likely all sorts of other applications, too, but none that are any better than that.

The first ads using the 3D barcode technology should show up in Japan this summer.