QR code

Developed in 1994 by a team led by Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave, a Toyota subsidiary, to track car parts faster than the one-dimensional barcode allowed. The name stands for Quick Response. The three large squares in the corners let a reader locate and square up the code regardless of angle, and a layer of Reed–Solomon coding corrects errors so the symbol still reads with up to 30 % of it damaged. Denso Wave chose not to charge a licence fee, making the format free to use; it was standardised as ISO/IEC 18004 in 2000. From the factory floor it spread to payments, tickets and restaurant menus.