With many businesses forced to accommodate social distancing and other public health measures, a new company called Scanit hopes that its technology is perfectly tailored to the new pandemic-induced reality.

Scanit is a technology similar to QR codes, but it can be used to scan codes on television screens, digital billboards, websites and other forms of digital media up to 60 feet away.

Mark Lass, a Rancho Santa Fe resident, and one of his partners were talking several years ago about how to enhance the basic QR codes.

“We were just thinking of some different ways to make it more efficient, especially on television screens and any digital display,” said Lass, Scanit’s chief operating officer and treasurer. “We knew digital billboards were starting to sprout up everywhere and everything like that, so we bounced around a lot of different ideas and we kind of came up with this solution.”

He added that they got patents for the technology, but decided to put the idea on the backburner for a few years. Once the COVID-19 pandemic struck, they thought it was a good time to explore their options.

“With COVID-19 coming and everything being contactless and social distancing, we started getting some traction because QR codes are back,” Lass said.

Some restaurants, for example, have been using QR codes that allow customers to pull up the menus on their phones, instead of making staff disinfect regular menus after each use. All businesses have had to adapt to new public health orders that will be in effect for the foreseeable future. Scanit could offer more possibilities for businesses to engage customers.

“We’ve got an amazing opportunity here with what we have because we have an app that [enables] social distancing, it’s contactless and it works from a tremendous distance,” Lass said, adding that the technology could also be used for customer rewards programs and to give business owners more analytics.

Scanit is not currently in use anywhere, but its owners think the right opportunity could be imminent.

“We’re the only ones that have a platform that can communicate with digital displays from a smartphone,” Lass said. “We’re hoping to get this thing launched pretty soon.”

Lass said there are “different avenues” the company can take.

“You only get one shot at this in the beginning and I want to make sure it’s a good one,” he added.

For more information about Scanit, visit scanit.io.