TechStuff Classic: What are QR Codes?

are they important? And we find out and so will you in this classic episode enjoy. So today we actually are going to talk about things that are in fact square. Uh in a way, they're a little square too in the slang sense, because we're just talking about you know, what's there in black and white encoded information in the form of a QR code q R meaning quick response. Yes. Um, I guess we should probably give a little background, kind of do a little backtracking before we actually talk about

QR codes and maybe talk about barcodes YEP, that's that's true. Um. Also, we've had several people mentioned this over the course of tech Stuff, and it's sort of I think, come up for Jonathan and me both lately in real life sort of a oh yeah, look at that. They're they're sort of showing up everywhere. So we decided to go ahead and tackle it in bar codes. Um, if you've just finished our episodes on IBM, IBM was actually where the traditional uh you know, vertical series of vertical line barcodes

first made their appearance. Yeah, and and the concept is is deceptively simple. It's the idea that you you create this series of lines and then you have a scanner. The skinner uses light to to bounce off of that series of lines, and technically it's just bouncing off the white spaces in between the lines, and the the width

between the lines determines what information is encoded there. And so by standardizing this information, you can make this series of lines and you can create a a digital code there, you scan it and it it converts that physical format into a digital uh digital information. Now, with barcodes, that information is somewhat limited to around twenty characters or so, and that's a problem if you want to store more

information than just twenty characters. It's great if you want to do things like create an inventory, so lots of lots of retailers have used these barcodes to create inventories. Yes. In fact, it's known as the UPC or universal product code. Yeah, so that allows you to establish, all, right, everything that bears this barcode is this product, and then you can further go on to define everything that is this product, is this price and this This was a huge boon

for retailers when people would purchase lots of goods. You have a scanner set up. The scanner is practically instantaneous, right, I mean, it just takes the speed of light, the speed that the light takes to go from the scanner to hit the code and bounce back to the the photo sensors that are part of the scanner. That's you know, it just takes an instant which is why you know it seems crazy to us. All we have to do is hold up this little series of bars up to

a screen and then almost it seems like it's instantaneous. Beep, there goes the price. And of course unless there's some problem with the barcode, in which case you scan, you scan, you scan, you rub it against something, you scan it again. Then eventually you you type in physically the the series of numbers underneath the barcode UH two into the computer, so you can register your purchase those series of numbers.

That's actually what is encoded in that barcode. There's not There have been conspiracy theories about things that have been encoded in barcodes, but really barcodes just cannot hold the sort of information, nor is there any real way of of establishing that that product belongs to you the person, unless you're you've also got like a frequent buyers card type thing, right right, Yeah, it's it's it's useful um for inventory keeping it as you pointed out, that's that's

why it was created. Um. The thing is, you know, if you have a store. Um. And this is something that we've mentioned before and other people mentioned before about the difference in internet retailers and physical what they call brick and mortar stores. There are only so many items that you can hold in most brick and mortar stores, even the superstores. I would say, you're not going to

exhaust um. I mean, it would be hard to hold a variety of of stuff in a brick and mortar store that would exhaust the number of UPC codes that you might used. Yes, that was redundant UPC code. You're talking about twenty digit number. I mean that's yeah, that's that's a lot of enough, that's a lot of digits. So but then, but then there are times when you

would like to have a way to store more information. Yeah, it might be that you want to be able to create, um uh, something that can allow you to to categorize and subcategorize and sub subcategorized product or a piece. Um let's say that you are a car manufacturing plant. I am a car manufacturing plant, and you have very many pieces that you have to keep track of for an individual car, and you make several different models of cars. So therefore you have a plethora, if you will, a

plethora of car parts. Do you know what a plethora means? Um? So, yeah, You've got all these different parts and pieces and they all fit in different ways, and you need to be able to encode that information so you make it very uh efficient. Well, the barcode may not give you the flexibility you need because we call the barcode a one D code, meaning that the direction is encoded or the

information is encoded in one direction. All right, so that one direction would be the fact, you know, that these little gaps between the bars that's where the info is encoded. You would want to create a different encoding device, something that perhaps is a two D code, and two D means that you can the information is encoded both horizontally and vertically. So now you've got a much larger playing ground where you can create um far more detailed information

encoding than you could with a barcode. That was the idea of the come up that that Toyota came up with. UM actually a Toyota subsidiary called Dense so wave back in they came up with this concept of a q R code, which was a type of two D code. Now we should also stress QR code is not the only kind of two D code. There are others as well. Ups uses a two D code I believe UM on their packaging, but it's not a QR code. It's similar to it UM it's the MAXI code that's the one

they use UM. So, but the concept is is very much the same. It's the idea that you have this and you've probably seen these. It's the that that box with all the little black dots in it. Yes, it looks like there's usually three boxes that are, Well, there's always three buckses. There's three buckses there. They have a little border around them at at the top right, top left, and bottom left corners. And then if you look carefully,

you might see that there's a tinier little dot. Uh that's a little bit set in from the bottom right corner that also has a little border around it. Well, that's a QR code and them the information that can be stored in theo QR code far outstrips that of a bar code. Yes, Now some people have said that they are read codes. They're not because you know, really they're square and they're flat, so they're not. When they

say too D, they're they're not talking about dimensions. They are two D. But there but they but remember what Jonathan was just saying, as directions, and yes, it because the different directions. I think some people sort of started calling them that. But that's a that's a sort of a slang term and it's not really uh technically correct when referring to it. But I have heard them called that um And yes, it does add some some serious

dimension to it. Um. Now, uh, you know, there is, as Jonathan said, some limitation, uh to the amount of information even at the size it is. But QR codes of have uh sort of moved out into the public eye, not just for use at uh you know, a dens O wave in Toyota. UM. They've actually sort of started to become a lot more popular here in the United States, I would say probably over the last eighteen months or so. Yeah,

in Japan they've been popular for a while. But the reason why they've been popular longer in Japan than in the United States is that in Japan, smartphone adoption UH started much earlier in Japan than in the United States. Chris and I will talk a little more about QR codes, probably make some puns, maybe references to early twenty ten pop culture. You'll have to find out in just a second. But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.

And here's the neat thing about these QR codes. If you have a phone that has a camera in it and it's capable of running apps, then you can create an app that can read QR codes. And because smartphones also have web connectivity ability as well as other abilities, you can design a QR code so that you know you you create a scanner that uses your phones camera to to capture the image of the QR code. It analyzes the QR code and then translates that into whatever

the QR code is is encoded to do. So it might be a website. So let's say that you create, um, an advertisement for some sort of product and you, uh, you know, you have a QR code right there, and you use your smartphone to capture that information and then it takes you to the website for that product, or perhaps it takes you to a video showing that product being used by someone. So you know, you might look at a probably to say, why would I ever want that?

And there's a little QR code. You're like, all right, whatever, I'll see what this has to do with it. And there might be actually a video there that shows you what that product is good for, and maybe that convinces you to buy it. So it's it's added a new dimension to advertisement. But and even then, that's not the only thing QR codes are being used for, but it's

very popular one. That's that's true. UM. Yeah, it's funny because um, you can also use it as sort of note to yourself to um, you know, when you're seeing something out in public and you go, oh, I need to remember that I want to look up, you know, look that up for more information later. Uh. Well, you know if you you scan the QR code and add it to your phone, um, then you can you know, save that for later. At least the application in my phone will allow me to store some for later, so

I can go back and look it up. But yeah, I was. According according to denso Um, the QR code has a maximum numeric capacity of seven thousand, eighty nine characters UM. Alpha numerica is four thousand, two hundred ninety six UM. And if you want to store uh kanji, you can also do that as well. Although it can hold one thousand, eight hundred seventeen character characters. That's still that's still very impressive. And you can store quite a

lot of information about something. And I can see lots of interesting applications, particularly in things like alternate reality games to use QR codes for example, UM, if you guys are familiar with alternate reality games at all, these are the games that often are are created by a marketing firm to to be part of a guerrilla marketing campaign for something else. One of the popular ones was along with It was called The Beast and it was part

of the marketing push for the film AI. Yeah, we talked about that in a previous episode, I mean way previous. So so these these games, they they bridge the gap between reality and fantasy. You know, you you usually take an active part in trying to play a role within a fantasy setting, but you're doing it through real life actions.

And that might be as simple as sending an email, or it may mean that you fill out some information and occasionally you get phone calls from characters within the game, and you in in real life have an impact on fictional characters within the game. And it's a very flexible, malleable type of gaming. And it's it's kind of fighting because it means that you get to play a part that's that's akin to what we think of as you know,

secret agents. Right, It's kind of like this this crazy conspiracy written world where you are one of the people who are running around trying to to solve the world's problems and things you do have real impact and it makes you feel like a hero and it's kind of awesome. Um well, QR codes could play a big part in that.

I mean, imagine that you create a movie that's all about conspiracy theories, and you create the posters for this movie, and you have in the corner of the poster a little QR code, and if you scan the QR code with a a smartphone, then it pulls up maybe a page of information. You've got You've got four thousand alpha

numeric characters you can play with. You might have a secret message in there directed to people who are going to take the time to scan that, or it may send you to a website that starts you on this journey.

And it's a great way to pull people in. And the thing about the thing one of the reasons why advertisers love QR codes is because even though it only hits a small percentage of the population, uh, you know, only a fraction of the people who see an advertisement with a QR code are going to take the time

to actually scan that QR code, right right. But that section of the population is the are the people you want to go for, because one, they are engaged, they're interested enough in whatever is going on to take the time to scan that, so you already have their attention. Too. They are at least somewhat affluent because they have a device capable of scanning a QR code. So it's insidious, right, You've got this engaged somewhat wealthy or at least they

have some discretionary income. Uh. This audience here, that's who you want when you're selling stuff. Yep. So uh, in a way, we're playing to their um, to their game. And also we should keep in mind that if it's a QR code where you are using it to to navigate to a web page, they can timestamp when you come to their web page and they can even get the information depending on on the way they've they've coded the page to know when and approximately where you are

when you navigate to that that website. So now they have even more information on you. So they know one you're engaged to, you are you have enough money to have a smartphone? Three, they know what time you visited the site and for where you are. M hmm. Now that's not so scary to the point where you know you're gonna have guys in black suits knock on your door in the middle of the night and escort you to a secret military base, unless you're playing a really

cool alternate reality game. Um. But it's one of those things where you know you've got to remember, like yeah, These things are fun and they give you a lot of information, but they don't just give you a lot of information. They give the people behind the QR code a little information. It might not be a lot, it may not be enough to invade your privacy, but it's

still something to think about up well. And and the thing is, the people who are collecting this type of information don't are They're not really interested in doing those things. They want marketing information because for them it's more valuable anyway. It's a sure thing. So let's talk a little bit about how this actually works because it's kind of interesting. Um, there are different zones on a QR code, and there

are different boxes that that mean different things. So those those three larger boxes that are in the corners the or three of the corners the the again the top right, top left, and bottom left, those corners that that's that's a those are positioning so it helps identify the fact that, yes, this is a QR code. They're the smaller boxes than the bottom right corner. It's in set a little bit,

but it's got its own little border around it. That's an alignment box, and that helps the the software determine, uh, the angle that the camera is at because that's one thing, right, You can't predict how a person is going to hold the camera when they take up an image of a R code, So the QR code has to be readable

from various angles and distances. Otherwise it's not useful. If if you always had to be directly above the QR code at a specific distance, it would be it wouldn't be user friendly enough for it to to have wide adoption. So using the distance and the orientation of these boxes in relation to one another, the software on your scanner, and your scanner again is just a piece of software

that's on your smartphones. Using your camera, the software can determine the orientation of that QR code, the angle, and then be able to take that into account when reading the other dots that are further in the center. That's where the actual data is encoded. Um it you know, just based upon which areas are covered in black ink and which ones aren't. That's where it learns, you know, this is what it translates into, this this particular kind

of information. But it has to be able to determine that orientation and an angle first, or else the distance may not seem quite right. You know, it may look like two two blocks of black ink are further apart than they actually are, which wouldn't that would that would mean that it would uh identify the information incorrectly if that were the case. So there's actually some error correction

in this QR software as well. Yes, as a matter of fact, you can do damage to the QR code, and within a reasonable amount of damage, the QR code can still be read because of the error correction. Yeah. Without that error correction, then you would have some real problems. Whenever let's say that you put a poster with a QR code, but you put on, say a a light post or or a telephone pole. Um. Now, so now you're talking about a surface that's curved, it's no longer

a flat surface. Well, that could, uh, that could make the QR code look a little funky to the camera. But the error correction in the q R software is more often than not capable of taking that into account and still giving you the correct information on that QR code, assuming that no one's gone in and like use the black marker to black out half of the code. So it's it's a very robust kind of software and it's

a very simple. Um uh code actually if you I mean, it's not hard to build an application that can actually encode information in the q R format. In fact, there are plenty out there that lets you do it for free. Yeah. I've created several QR codes just for fun. I just use the website, um that you can, and there's several out there that you can just plug in a r L or even a short message, um, you know, and

and printed out. One of the things that you'll notice if you do that, though, if you know, you start playing around and you have something fairly short, the boxes are are considerably larger. You can once you've done this a couple of times, you can look at it at a QR code and go, Okay, that one has a lot of text in it, and this one over here doesn't. Just by just by looking at it and just from the experience of having having played around with it, you'll

be able to tell. But um, yeah, the Denzel Wave website has some information that sort of suggests that, uh, you know, it takes some special equipment. And at this point, um, they're so common that you know, you really don't need anything very special. I mean, you could you could print them out on on stickers. They don't have to be you know, they could be something that you pick up at your office supply store if you wanted to do that, or you know, just a plain piece of paper that

you put up with a piece of tape. UM. It really doesn't take anything special. You just want to make sure that, uh, that there's not a lot of blurring. But even there, UM marketing companies, now that it's become common to use QR codes for these purposes, marketing companies are starting to experiment with them and add things like color and designs within that because uh, again it sort of depends on how much information you have stored in there.

If you don't have very much information, if it's like a short U r L, the r L to your company, for example, you could put a design that's pleasing to the human eye in there. I've seen all kinds of of things. I actually have Jonathan's sort of craning to see my notes. Here's what I'm showing him. One with an elephant. Mashable actually had an article if you want to find it, UM where that was made from? Uh

that was written by a Hamilton Chan. I believe UM and his company makes an iPhone app that that scans QR codes. But basically you can do things like you can round the corners of the boxes. They don't have to be square. You can put images in there as long as it doesn't interfere with the message you're trying to do. Um, you can you can basically make them into uh within reason. You can add some artistic qualities to it and still have readable by a QR code reader.

That's right, Chris. Actually, I don't know who said the last thing. Tari is the one who gets to chew use that. But whatever the case, I hope you guys just take a little break with me. Come on, let's go here from our sponsor, there's some pretty cool applications that you and I could could put QR codes too. Besides, just you know, playfully like I created a secret message. I mean you could do that. There are enough kids

out there now have smartphones. Like I remember back in the day you would write little secret messages to your buddies using whatever very simple replace code. Right, this symbol means A and this symbol means B. But QR codes give you the option of actually creating a message, encoding it in a into a QR code and then handing it to someone else. And it's only if you have a scanner that you're able to read it. Now, granted that's not safe information. Anyone with a scanner would be

able to read it. You would you might want to encode it. Yes, you would have to encrypt it as well as as encoded into the so there'll be encryption and encoding in the same message. Otherwise, anyone with a smartphone, anyone with a smartphone with a QR code reader could intercept it. But think of it like this, Like let's say that I wanted to make new business cards for myself. I might create a QR code that if you scanned, it would take you to a full profile website about myself.

And it might have my resume, It might have uh samples of my writing, It might have maybe a sample of the podcast. It might have a demo reel of my video work. All of that could be linked to my my business card. Now, I wouldn't want to put all those u r l s on a business card because it would just take up too much space. And you want a business card to look fairly elegant um. Now, so you could do that where you have your name

and your title and all of that stuff. Or if it's a personal business card like the one I was talking about, it might be your name and your general area of expertise and the QR code takes care of the rest of it. I've actually seen, for the mind has a business card, um where all it had was his name on it and the QR code, and you would scan it and would take you to his website where it had all the rest of the information and um, yeah,

he's uh, it's his actar. I don't mind saying his name because he's a uh he's now a journalist with This Week in Tech. He's a regular on Tech News today. So it worked out for him. So the way to go I is and uh, he's a great guy. So I was, and I was blown away when I saw his business card. It was one of the earliest ones I had seen that used the QR code, so he was really on the cutting edge of that as far

as the United States is concerned. Keep in mind that again in Japan, this has been around for a couple of decades, but only since smartphones have really taken off in the US, so we can really kind of point our fingers to the iPhone. I think and say the iPhone is what led the revolution in the consumer marketplace in the United States for the smartphone to really take off.

That's why we're starting to see QR codes everywhere. Yeah, but yeah, it is true though that the QR codes are are so ubiquitous now that you all the major smartphone manufacturers have apps and you can find if you're interested in doing this, you can find a free app. I'm pretty sure I know there's there's some for iPhone and Android both and I'm assuming probably for BlackBerry, and there's there's BlackBerry. I'm sure there's web os as web

os UM. But you know, as you were saying earlier in the show, UM, I mean, we don't want to move too far from QR codes. But in researching this, uh, you know, the densil Wave website does list some of the others. UM. But I found the fp codes service or standard by Fujitsu, which uses UM basically encodes the the code inside an image on a poster UM using yellow ink, which makes it more or less invisible. It

doesn't it's not as obvious as a QR code. UM. And there have been people who are doing this basically using steganography, which is the art of hiding hiding messages

within images. Yeah. So, so like you could say you had a um A poster up promoting your company's business, and you just had a picture of whatever it is that you do, the service that you provide people, you know, going through business meeting or whatever, and somebody scanned the picture with their phone and there may not be overtly a code in there, but just by scanning the the image, it would pull up the information just because there's a

code embedded within the image, which I think is fascinating stuff. But the downside of that, and and I was thinking, wow, you know this, this actually has been out for quite some time. The press release UM that I read came out years ago, and I was thinking, why have you know, I've we've heard of QR codes. Maybe it's that the FP codes aren't um you know, it's like in in America the same the same thing. We're just not having the adoption rate that we might for the QR codes.

Then I thought, well, this is not quite as useful for marketing, at least not yet, because with the QR codes you have the colorful symbol, you know, black and white square that's obvious on the poster. And you know I'm supposed to scan this. I mean, at least if you have a phone that that does this. A lot of people still don't know. Again that's why we're doing the podcast. But but it's there's no point in embedding code within an image if people don't think to pick

up their phone and scan it. And even even if you pick up your phone and take a picture of it, you still have to use the right application to interpret that code. Right Like, if if I just take a picture of a QR code, my phone doesn't know that that's that it needs to decode that information. It's only when I open up specific QR code decoders, uh and and though that will analyze the actual information that's within that QR code and then give me the proper response.

So you would have to know one that you have to take an image of whatever that poster is, or that or that now anything, it doesn't even have to be a poster um. And two you would have to use the right the correct application. And if everyone's using a different set of standards, then you would have to have an application for every single company, right you would it would only be if something had become standardized across multiple companies, like the QR code. People are using that

as a de facto standard. Is not a standard, but people are using it as if it were. UH. And we've seen cure codes used even on UH in in television, because remember we watched UH. After we did our our episode about cyber bullying, we decided to watch the Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon UH tribute to the song Friday Yes. And at the end of the song there was a guy in the back holding up a QR code UH sign.

And if you were to pause the video as we did, and then use a QR code reader as we did to determine what that was, you would be led to a special video that Jimmy Fallon made as a thank you to people who had donated to the cause and UH and and just kind of rambled it wasn't sort of like this podcast, but it didn't. It didn't UH. It was It was interesting that they had done it.

It was kind of a cool thing, and you might actually see that that could be even a neat thing that you start seeing in incorporated into say web series. It would be very easy to do television and movies, i'd be probably, I'm guessing won't happen as often, especially for films, because one, you don't want to encourage everyone to whip their smartphone out and light up the theater with all all those screens, and too, you would have to have it on screen long enough for people to

be able to train their cameras on it. Um. So if it would work from that distance, yeah, no, I've heard of I've heard of QR codes that are on billboards that could and at least in theory, on a clear day, be scanned from up to one mile away. Well, sure, on a clear day you could see forever. I'm good. Uh, it's so good that you're just out of smack and range. Um. But yeah, it's it appears that they finally made their their appearance for good over here. I'm sorry I used

appearance too many times. Um, But yeah, I think I think they're sort of around to stay for the short term. I think they will eventually be replaced by something a little bit more, um, something less obvious to the eye. But right, it'll take some time for people to get used to the idea that they're hidden messages and their their real life Easter eggs everywhere I go, and all

I need to see them as a smartphone. Yeah, it's really just a matter of time before we start seeing smartphones with cameras that have that capability already built into the camera feature where automatically detect that sort of stuff without you having to tell it to go to a

special a special application, that sort of thing. I mean, we also see it with the augmented reality uh applications, where like the idea of having the facial recognition software so that you can recognize a specific person's face, you

create a profile of that person. I think that's fascinating, right, and then you would hold like let's say I hold up my camera to to Chris here, and I've I've built in his profile, and then I see floating around his head his Twitter feed or his Facebook feed, which are all empty because he never updates them. But uh, but let's say that then that that could be a something that you would build into the camera feature as well.

So there may come a day where your basic smartphone camera will have all these features built in specifically to the to the system. Yeah. Yeah, although I hope they, the people who make these devices will put an off switch for that because I guess he you know, taking the family to the amusement park. You get everybody in the shot and you're like, okay, everybody say cheese and over their shoulders, like you know, buy so and so soft drink. Everything is. I don't want that now. I

just want to take a photo of my family. I would imagine that you would be able to set layers. I'm really hoping, just like just like with mapping applications, where you can look at things like traffic layers and satellite images as opposed to maps. I would imagine. Uh. Granted, I'm not the one who's um design these things, so we know sometimes the manufacturers go, but everyone wants that the kitchen sink, that's what we should throw in there. Well,

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