Royal Mail brings out a smartphone readable stamp

The Royal Mail has come up with an invention which it has dubbed the world’s first “intelligent” stamp.

While the stamp isn’t actually sentient – it can’t lick and attach itself, sprout legs and then seek out the nearest postbox – it’s a clever little gummed square in that it can be scanned by your iPhone or Android powered smartphone.

Providing you have the Junaio application installed, which is a free augmented reality or AR platform. This can recognise the stamp, and then direct the user to a website associated with it, the BBC reports.

The first techno-stamp is part of the Great British Railways series, and when scanned it directs the phone owner to an online video of Bernard Cribbins reading WH Auden’s The Night Mail.

It’s an interesting idea, and no doubt we’re going to see more and more ways in which smartphones are incorporated into everyday life using their cameras and image recognition technology.