Whenever you enter a restaurant and ask for the menu, likelihood is you might be informed to scan a QR code together with your cellphone to view and order meals and drinks – no paper menu wanted. Equally, many individuals now scan a QR code every day to purchase fish and greens from an area store. For the reason that pandemic, QR codes have popped up all over the place: on cost apps, coconut water carts, and even billboards. They’ve change into a signature of our digital lives, particularly in India. However have you ever ever questioned the place this pixelated black-and-white sq. comes from?
The story begins in Japan. It was 1994 and Masahiro Hara, who was working at Denso Wave, a Toyota car-parts subsidiary, acquired the thought to create the QR code. Hara, a lead in vehicle manufacturing, was enjoying the traditional technique recreation Go at work when he observed the association of the black and white stones on the board. The idea of putting black and white dots on a grid sparked the thought behind the QR Code, which stands for “Fast Response Code”.
Earlier than QR codes
Within the early Nineties, barcode scanning wasn’t new – it was already being utilized in Japan and different components of the world. Barcode know-how was first patented in 1949 by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. Their patent described the essential construction of utilizing pairs of traces to signify numbers – a technique nonetheless used at this time. Curiously, the primary barcode didn’t embrace vertical traces in any respect; as an alternative, it used a collection of concentric circles.
Barcodes had been used to trace components, however the system was inefficient. (Picture credit score: Denso Wave)
Woodland and Silver initially struggled to get firms fascinated by their invention. However that modified within the Nineteen Sixties, when engineer and physicist Theodore H Maiman constructed the primary working laser, making it doable to rapidly decode a barcode’s line patterns. The primary official barcodes quickly started to be adopted in some industries. Nonetheless, a serious situation emerged: totally different shops within the US launched barcode pilot tasks utilizing vastly several types of barcode symbols.
By the late Nineteen Sixties, grocery shops throughout the US have been going through challenges corresponding to rising labour prices and difficulties in monitoring stock. Barcodes have been seen as the perfect resolution to automate the method – however provided that everybody within the business agreed to make use of the identical image. To deal with this, the business fashioned an advert hoc committee within the early Nineteen Seventies to develop a workable barcode system. This committee created the Common Product Code (UPC), which was designed to be appropriate with several types of barcode symbols.
Hara and his workforce mainly remodeled a one-dimensional barcode right into a compact, two-dimensional grid that may very well be learn swiftly — QR stands for “fast response.” (Picture credit score: Denso Wave)
The committee then had to decide on an ordinary image. They invited submissions from varied firms, narrowed the checklist all the way down to seven finalists, and after three years of deliberation, selected IBM’s design. The IBM image has change into synonymous with the phrase “barcode”. It turned the business normal, and the very first UPC barcode was scanned at a grocery retailer in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974.
Limitations of barcodes
Hara knew the usual UPC barcode was removed from excellent and had a number of limitations. These barcodes have been one-dimensional, encoding data horizontally by the width and spacing of vertical traces. One main situation was that if a part of the barcode was torn or broken, the machine couldn’t learn it. One other limitation was that every barcode might maintain solely about 20 characters of knowledge.
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The credit score of revival of QR codes goes to China.
At the moment in Japan, the automotive business was going by a transitional section. Hara had been receiving requests from area staff to develop a greater approach to scan inventories. A single field of parts usually carried as many as 10 barcodes that needed to be scanned individually. There was a transparent want for a much less labour-intensive technique to retailer extra data.
Hara wished to alter that. He and his workforce got down to clear up the issue by making a “higher barcode” that might effectively observe vehicles and auto components throughout manufacturing. Hara finally got here up with the idea of the QR code, which might decode as much as 10 occasions quicker than its predecessors and retailer roughly 7,000 characters.
He developed a two-dimensional barcode within the form of a sq., which addressed the difficulty of restricted knowledge capability. Nonetheless, Hara confronted early challenges with the brand new 2D barcode design. When barcodes have been printed alongside different textual content, scanning machines usually didn’t detect them, making the sq. barcodes impractical. At some point, whereas looking a subway window on his approach to work, Hara observed how skyscrapers stood out distinctly from the encircling panorama. This commentary helped him discover out a approach to make sq. barcodes visually stand out from textual content. After a number of iterations, he got here up with the thought of embedding three small squares – every with a selected black-to-white ratio – on the corners of the barcode. This design labored, and scanners might recognise and skim the code, no matter its orientation. Not solely that, the QR code designed by Hara might nonetheless be learn even when it was smudged or partially broken.
ISO certification
A part of the explanation why QR know-how labored so nicely was that its two-dimensional design allowed extra knowledge to be accessed by optical scanners at any given time. The code is also scanned from a wide range of angles and distances. This was particularly helpful on meeting traces and labored nicely for machine components – lots of which had distinctive and totally different shapes.
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A QR code is characterised by a two-dimensional sample of sq. black and white dots. (Picture credit score: Denso Wave)
Since Hara labored for a automotive parts producer, the QR code was initially designed with the car business in thoughts. Japan’s main carmaker, Toyota, confirmed curiosity in Hara’s QR code and adopted it in its factories – a testomony to the know-how’s potential and its means to enhance effectivity within the manufacturing course of. However it was the start of one thing a lot larger. Not even Hara might have predicted that his invention wouldn’t solely rework industries but in addition create totally new segments and markets.
QR codes started to be broadly adopted when Hara’s employer, Denso Wave, made the know-how freely obtainable to the general public with out charging licensing charges, regardless of holding the patents. A brand new wave of adoption started when the QR code obtained ISO certification in Japan in 2000, and the know-how began to search out its manner into on a regular basis life.
New lease of life
By 2012, many started to query whether or not QR know-how was lifeless or nonetheless had life left. Companies weren’t utilizing QR codes as broadly as initially projected. The truth is, QR codes have been even referred to as “lifeless”. Nonetheless, in China, the QR code discovered a brand new lease of life, because of the smartphone growth that had begun within the nation. QR codes began for use for making cellular funds, accessing key providers, claiming reductions, and enabling totally new apps and providers to be constructed. WeChat is a chief instance of how the app utilised QR codes and created new providers and options round them.
One of many main benefits of the QR code is their huge knowledge storage capabilities. (Picture credit score: NPCI)
As smartphones gained reputation, companies discovered new methods to reap the benefits of the cellphone’s cameras, making the QR code an underlying know-how behind many fashionable and mainstream apps and providers. What had been efficiently carried out in China within the early 2010s was then launched elsewhere, together with in India, in the course of the peak of the pandemic. Native companies started to undertake QR codes, permitting customers to easily scan them with their cellphone digital camera to entry a brand new service or web site. Nonetheless, what many hadn’t anticipated in India was how QR codes might introduce digital funds to over a billion folks.
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UPI revolution
With the launch of the Unified Funds Interface (UPI), an infrastructure created by the nation’s prime funds processor, the Nationwide Funds Company of India (NPCI), cellular apps constructed on the UPI infrastructure might securely entry a number of financial institution accounts and merge providers corresponding to making digital funds and peer-to-peer cash transfers in actual time. Right now, UPI is among the most dominant strategies of digital cost in India. UPI transactions hit Rs 24.77 trillion in worth and 19.78 billion in quantity in March 2025, showcasing how cashless funds utilizing QR codes have caught on in India.
India is taking a lead in cash-less funds, because of UPI.
Sure, QR codes are all over the place, however sarcastically, Japan – the place the QR code was invented – has been left behind. In Japan, money remains to be king, and the nation remains to be warming as much as the thought of cashless funds and QR codes. Customers and companies are reluctant to alter, at the same time as different nations are already on the trail to turning into cashless societies. Nonetheless, Covid-19 led to a push towards contactless options, together with QR codes in Japan. The federal government additionally started selling cashless initiatives by providing incentives to companies and customers.