In the past, some companies and a number of cemeteries have promoted the use of QR codes on small "medallions" that are cemented onto the face of the tombstone. Anyone with an Apple or Android smartphone could scan the QR code and immediately see a web page devoted to the life of the person buried there. Tombstone experts have questioned the practice of using any sort of adhesive to attach anything to a tombstone. The new app from Otter Creek Holdings plans to make QR codes obsolete by replacing them with the one thing that never changes: latitude and longitude.
The new tombstone app gives cemetery visitors the power to link up to genealogical information on the dead by simply snapping a quick photo of a particular gravesite's monument from the app's interface. The photo includes longitude and latitude information embedded in the photo's metadata. The smartphone or any desktop or laptop computer then can access the photo and its included metadata to instantly recognize the exact tombstone in question and to display all known information about the stone and the person it commemorates.
But that's just half the capabilities of the new app. A customized image recognition technology will compare the uploaded photo to a database of gravestone photos from sites like billiongraves.com, which will then connect the user to information on the deceased from megadata partner sites such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.
The result should be instant identification of any recorded tombstone from any location in the world, accompanied by all known information about the person buried there. All of this can be done without attaching any "foreign" devices or adhesives to the tombstone.
I searched both the Apple and Android app stores today but could not yet find any reference to Otter Creek Holdings' new LegacyTec app. However, the company does expect it to appear in both stores within a week or two. The LegacyTec app will be free of charge as well as advertisement-free.
You can learn a bit more about this new smartphone app in the BillionGraves.com blog at http://blog.billiongraves.com/. The same article includes a video you can watch there or directly on YouTube at http://youtu.be/gb9gH6uipqE.
