Under the wan light of corporate neon lights, two men in their thirties are busy, isolated in their office. Piles of books and electric cables, between them sits only one computer. Masahiro Hara and Takayuki Nagaya tried to negotiate for two but, at the head of Denso Wave, the auto parts production company for which they work, the management was uncompromising: no budget for their project. . Blame it on the explosion of the Japanese speculative bubble which, in 1992, no longer encouraged the country’s bosses to invest in innovation. Rather ironic for an invention which, years later, is found on every street corner.
Because what the two engineers are up to is the QR code, or quick response code. Today, popularized by the health crisis, this black and white square stores information about people vaccinated against COVID-19, provides a link to the menu in restaurants or indicates the origin of certain products at the supermarket. Unimaginable for this creation which was perceived as superficial in France a few years ago. With a few more white hair, Masahiro Hara now willingly tells the story of this invention, on which he himself did not necessarily rely: “I was mainly thinking of professional use when I created it”, specifies, with a smile. lips, Japanese, to Release.
Far from imagining that what they are in the process of developing will one day serve as a tattoo for some, Masahiro Hara and Takayuki Nagaya then try above all to lighten (and accelerate) the work of workers in car factories. As the engineer explains, at the time, “the entire production line of cars is managed by bar codes”. By alternating lines, these store information about a product, such as its price. A simple scan is then enough to reveal and digitize them. Their invention in 1949 aimed to reduce the wrist problems of cashiers, who were then forced to write everything down.
Kind of super barcode
In the 1990s, more and more information had to be associated with auto parts, and barcodes had an insurmountable limit: their size. Only about twenty alphanumeric characters (numbers and letters) can be stored there. To overcome this problem, part packaging is therefore covered with ten bar codes to provide the maximum amount of data. Which makes it so much for workers to scan.
So Masahiro Hara and his colleague think about it. How to create a kind of super barcode, in which everything fits? At that time, the engineer’s passion for go, a board game of Chinese origin involving white and black pawns on a grid, inspired him. “I very quickly realized that a two-dimensional structure and not one like the barcode would allow more information to be included”, he explains, in Japanese, since he never put himself to English. More is saying something since QR codes contain up to 4296 alphanumeric characters, 200 times more than bar codes.
Once this idea is found, Masahiro Hara continues, for months, to be active in his office. The idea of the square came quickly, but another problem gave it some difficult code: that of recognition by the camera for the scanner. Faced with the only alternation of black and white, the latter is lost. A distinctive sign must be incorporated into the invention. To find out, the engineer then embarks on a very laborious task. Every day, for each language, each writing, he analyzes the proportion of white and black. One by one, he dissects them in order to come up with a unique combination in the world, which he takes a year to find: that of the three small squares adorning the corners of all the QR codes.
“Linking offline and online”
The small squares integrated into the big square, in 1994, that’s it: the QR code is ready. And in Japanese society, from the 2000s, it was a hit. At Toyota, it speeds up the work of workers, but also makes it more precise. Indeed, while a scratched barcode is unreadable, a QR code damaged up to 30% remains functional. And the invention appeals, too, outside the factories.
On advertising posters, pencils, even boxes of vision lenses… When Masahiro Hara walks in his neighborhood, he finds her everywhere. And, in some ways, the use of his work ends up exceeding him. “Bar hostesses had QR codes tattooed on their arm to give their phone number and personal information,” he notes, still astonished.
Miles away from the arms of Japanese hostesses, in Korea, China, Thailand or Taiwan, Masahiro Hara’s creation spread from 2005, imported by Japanese factories located in these territories. The other continents, on the other hand, do not flash on the QR code until ten years later. Especially because, while since 2002 Japanese laptops have been equipped with cameras that can read them, iPhones only offer them from the 2010s.
A little earlier, some advertisers and flagships of American technology are already predicting a great future in the small square. Among them, Google. In 2007, Sean Owen was a developer there. He vividly remembers the interest in the QR code for Google Print Ads, the service for buying ads in traditional newspapers. By referring to a site URL, the creation of Masahiro Hara would make it possible to make the link between paper and the Web. Or, as this former employee of the multinational puts it more nicely in Release, it would “link the offline and the online”. A thrilling project which, he readily admits, comes “far too early”.
Flop in Western public space
In any case, to do this, the engineer is working on the construction of a QR code reader, a project that he finally puts into practice. open source in order to allow anyone to contribute. Until 2010, more than 140 tech freaks brought their line of code to the building before the application was successful, under the name Barcode Scanner. With more than 16 million users, it is now the benchmark, even if Sean Owen says to see it lose about 10% of its followers per year, more efficient systems having emerged since.
Ironically, as Japan scans it in turns, Google infuriates it, the QR code flops monumental when it enters Western public space. For those who are not interested in technology, the verdict is final: the invention is futile. In the media, only a few exceptional uses lead to her being talked about.
As in 2011 as for this hoax in Morbihan, which imagines a farmer tagging his cows for a game or, in 2013, when the company Épitaphe was created in Poitiers. Its principle? Burn QR codes on the graves of cemeteries to learn more about the deceased. When in 2015, Snapchat also seizes it (the objective being to add a friend more quickly by scanning it), the specialized media Techcrunch quips in the title: “How Snapchat made QR codes cool again”.
Whooping cough of the pandemic
If not making them cool, what has allowed QR codes to gain momentum is the COVID-19 pandemic. Sean Owen explains, “The first time I saw anyone other than a computer scientist scan a QR code was last year, for restaurant menu links. “Between its speed of use, its storage capacity and its international use, the small square was quickly preferred to its competitors, such as the French 2D-Doc. In the ranking of the best applications drawn up by Google Play Store appears in fourth place a QR code reader, downloaded more than 100 million times. The health passport which must be checked by bars, restaurants or the border police is no stranger to this success.
If the QR code can have the radios, the cardiogram information of people … in an emergency, it could save lives
Having become a darling of the pandemic, the QR code however sees its success getting it into trouble. Between those referring to phishing sites stealing the information of Internet users and those stolen in order to be resold, the limits of the invention in terms of security are becoming more and more visible. At the age of 60, Masahiro Hara is competing for ideas to perfect his precious tool and make it safer. Recently, he thus developed the SQRC, a QR code allowing to hide part of the information it contains.
The next step ? Create a new one, capable of containing images. In addition to the fun aspect, he hopes to see his future creation break through in the hospital environment: “If the QR code can have radios, information on people’s cardiograms… in an emergency, it could save lives. »Saving lives without enriching his own: in 1999, Masahiro Hara placed his invention under a free license. Not a penny has fallen into his pocket since the start of the COVID-19 crisis. A square inventor, like his work.