Good day

I want to develop a product that must be capable of reading a number remotely on request over a long distance.

The user has for example 100 items that he must be able to scan, like a barcode from a distance of say 15 meters.

The only thing that I could think of is that each item has a light sensitive switch and when you shine a laser light on it (from a custom handheld device), it sends a number to the handheld (user) with either RF or a high frequency sound?

Any ideas?