An Invisible Marking System Your Phone Scans
How this tech reveals the order of a shuffled deck.
Technology is beginning to be embraced more and more by magicians as the methods are becoming more reliable.
The second key thing that's changing when it comes to tech and magic is the type of tricks magicians are performing with technology. The community has learned to use such methods in more invisible or organic ways. This brings us neatly to the third key reason magicians are starting to embrace technology – the world around us is embracing technology, too.
With people becoming more likely to carry phones than cash, pens, pads, and purses, it's feeling less and less unusual to incorporate your phone or theirs into your magic.
It's also very hard not to feel excited by some of the methods that rely on technology. Let's look at some details of a marking system two coders shared online. The deck below has a visible barcode printed on it. Scanning the barcode will reveal where every card is within the deck (or isn’t — if cards are missing).
A camera scans the deck and feeds the data into software that can tell you whatever you like based on the information. I hope your minds are already going wild with possible applications.
A marked deck was released that used a somewhat similar principle many years ago. The marking was fast enough to be read by the human eye and would only tell you which card had been selected. The brilliant thing about that trick release was that the markings were printed with special invisible UV inks. So they were invisible to the human eye until lit by a specific LED light.
Ah, it looks like these clever coders also thought of that.
One of the decks above is unmarked, and the other has a barcode printed with invisible inks. The infrared ink is only visible under special infrared conditions.
