It seems like they are everywhere
these days. On fliers, on soft drinks and even on coffee collars.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about Quick Response (a.k.a. QR)
codes. In today's smart phone abundant, social media driven world,
it's hard to miss these distinct looking two-dimensional bar codes.
Why, even as I type this post, I accidentally discovered one to my
immediate right taped to a table!
When I first heard about Q.R. Codes, I
was skeptical. It seemed to me like every time I saw one, it was
stamped to an advertisement, beckoning everyone near to load up their
smart phone with more advertisements. I was talking to a friend of
mine about this, when he stopped me. You see, my
friend had spent a year in Japan for studying abroad. Naturally,
there were QR codes around every corner there, Japan being the place
of origin of the QR code. My friend explained to me that QR codes had
saved him from getting lost in Japan several times by providing a map
of the surrounding area. I was intrigued. It was at that point that I
decided I wanted to learn more about this interesting technology.
What really amazes me about QR codes is
the design. While making the QR code for this blog, I discovered that
it was possible to erase sizable chunks of the code and it would
still be readable. This is due Reed-Solomon error correction algorithm used in modern QR Code standards. The idea
behind the error correction is that the message being encoded can be
broken up into multiple, redundant blocks. This allows some of the
data to be corrupted (as long as said data is present in one of the
redundant blocks) allowing codes to be customized aesthetically.
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| Anatomy of a QR Code |
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| This QR code still works! |
Hi Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting post. Good job for some dramatic instances in our lives and make me understand how ofter we can see QR code in daily life. Also, the things that how to modify and decorate our QR code by using the technique of error correction attracts me more. I think the disadvantage of QR code is his outlook. QR code is a set of black cube and white cube, and this truth would make people hard to link it as a "picture". So decorating is more important than we though in QR codes. Thanks for your article. It is very useful for me!