Rio de Janeiro has beautiful sidewalks with black and white mosaics of waves, fish and abstract images. Mixing technology with tradition to provide tourists information, the city is embedding bar codes into its symbolic sidewalks. The first two-dimensional bar codes, or QR codes, were installed Friday at Arpoador, a massive boulder that rises at the end of Ipanema beach.

You simply have to download an application on your smartphone or tablet and photograph the icon. The app reads the code and you can then access interesting information like Arpoador gets big waves, making it a hot spot for surfing and giving the 500-meter beach nearby the name of “Praia do Diabo,” or Devil’s Beach. You will also find out that the rock is called Arpoador because fishermen once harpooned whales off the shore. Information is available in Portuguese, Spanish and English along with a map of the area.

This comes after Alex Balfour, head of new media at the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG), warned Rio in September to ‘sort out its app strategy’ for the 2016 Games, claiming a lack of use of location-based social media services such as Foursquare and Facebook Places as a failing of London 2012. The city plans to install 30 of these QR codes at popular sites, for the benefit of Rio’s approximately 3 million foreign visitors.

Jason Clampet of Skift thinks otherwise, “QR codes are great for one thing in travel: making money for the people who sell them to unsavvy destinations and hotels who don’t know enough about technology to know that nobody cares to use QR codes.”

Let us know what your take is !!