Developed by the Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994 as a means of encoding various official information. Initially, the QR code was used in the Japanese transportation industry to mark parts and spare parts during transportation.
In principle, the presentation of information in the form of a QR code is similar to scanning and recognition of plain text. However, OCR (text recognition) procedure requires complicated and cheap software (for example, Fine Reader), and besides it does not fit the same for any font. QR-code is easily read and scanned by computing devices, which allows very fast transfer of information to the electronic form without requiring manual dialing.
The maximum number of characters that fit into one QR code:
- Numbers - 7089
- Numbers and letters (including Cyrillic alphabet) - 4296
- Binary code - 2953 bytes
- Hieroglyphs - 1817
Theoretically, you can encode images, sounds and stuff.
Currently, QR-code is widely distributed in Asian countries (especially in Japan), gradually developing in Europe and North America. He received the greatest recognition among mobile users - by installing a recognizer program, the subscriber can instantly enter text information into his phone, add contacts to the address book, navigate through web links, send SMS messages, etc.
In Japan, similar codes are applied to almost all products sold in stores, they are placed in advertising booklets and reference books. Using the QR-code even organize various competitions and role-playing games.
Using QR code
- Business cards: do not manually enter data into the phone,
- Site section contacts: in fact an online business card,
- Links to the mobile section of the site,
- In outdoor advertising.
Leading Japanese mobile operators jointly produce branded mobile phones with built-in support for QR-code recognition.
