QR (Quick Rresponse) Code is a matrix two-dimensional printable code, originally developed by an automobile component manufacturer, Denso of Tokyo. Whereas classic barcode can carry only numerals, QR Code stores any character, alphanumeric or even Kanji.

Clicking a business card with QR Code printed on it. No need to tire your thumb to make an entry on K-tai address book.

QR Code is widely used in Japanese everyday life, but I bet you've never seen it yet. QR Code works dilligently for Japanese K-tai world. Users love K-tai Web browser. But to type URL could pose a big problem. You need to hit, on average, 2.5 key strokes for a single ASCII character with your left/right thumb. No K-tai user wants to type a long and tedious URL this way.

Here comes the godsend QR Code. When an Internet merchant wants to entice new customers into visiting its K-tai shopping site, it encodes its URL string into QR Code and prints it everywhere, poster, flyer, magazine, sticker... A K-tai user simply "clicks" this QR Code with his K-tai camera. The decoding software kicks in and delivers the decoded URL to K-tai browser. It jumps to the Web site directly. No thumb artist is needed anymore! It could be an elixir for those who have slow and clumsy thumbs, like yours truly.

Even the soft underbelly of a blimp has QR Code printed.

Thus you can encouter these square QR Codes everywhere on Japanese streets. Would be pretty annoying if your K-tai did not have a camera. But unfortunately, there is no K-tai without a camera in Japan. The Code has propagated so rampantly that, these days, you can find them printed even on the lowly prawn crackers.

Now, a cracker bakery in Kagawa prefecture of Shikoku Island, Shimahide, delivers prawn crackers with QR Code clearly printed on it. Oh, don't worry, it's perfectly edible and tasty, made from powdered prawns. Printing ink comes from a tropical plant, totally harmless to your body, so Shimahide claims.

This is it! QR Coded prawn cracker. Take a shot with K-tai camera, then munch it.

What's the use? For the promotional goods and PR materials to be given away. This kinky cracker has a fairer chance to be noticed and its URL to be visited than the ubiquitous paper media. Also, how about fortune prawn crackers? Chinese restaurants in the US give a few de rigeur crackers with tiny printed oracle embedded in it after the meal. QR Code can store enough oracles for every zodiac of customers. This QR cracker can really be a bright and tasty idea, I guess, at least for US mobile users.

All right, QR Code has no size restriction. It can be hidden in a dot of "i" like a Cold War spy did. (In this case, you have to have a high-res microscopic K-tai camera to decode it!) Or you can expand it to enormous size, visible and decodable from kilometers away. Some of the real estate developpers do exactly that. They hang a gigantic QR Code poster on the wall of building they are busily constructing.

It's rather difficult to ignore a QR Code of this dimension.

Would-be customers click the poster fom very far-away location and browse the developer's Web site to check the particulars with his K-tai. They don't need to plunge into dirty building site or so-called "showroom". An interesting idea, isn't it?

 

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kaisei1
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