Huon on the internet
Error correction sounds good. It means fewer errors, right? When it comes to QR codes, that’ll mean easier scanning for people, surely? It seems like that’s not the whole story.
I wondered about this, and couldn’t find an answer, so I did some exploration, and found there’s two factors in tension: the error correction on one hand, and the resulting data density on the other:
QR (quick response) codes are now extremely widespread in Australia, because they’re used for COVID contact tracing check-ins and placed in every shop window, but they’re somewhat magic. Before diving into the details, Wikipedia says a whole lot about QR codes; the summary is: a QR code is a pattern of black and white squares that encodes some data (often a URL), that cameras can read.
The article even has diagrams. Here’s one with a whole lot of detail, highlighting a bunch of key concepts going into a QR code, however there’s two that are most important when considering how easy it is to scan a QR code: version and error correction.
