How do QR codes work? The checkerboard patterns taking over the world, demystified. Go to Saily.com/veritasium and use the code ‘veritasium’ to get an exclusive 15% off your first purchase.
Special thanks to Mashiro Hara and Yuki Watanabe.
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I use them for our printed version of our documentation, each document has a cover page with a QR code pointing to the latest version of the electronic copy.
Handy during an outage, and you don't have to search for the online copy.
I've always found them to be kinda cool, but, like... I can type in a url faster than getting out a camera and getting it to scan most of the time. Especially when they're using a shortener to have a URL that's literally just 4 characters long. So I pretty much never actually do anything with QR codes.
Agreed. Often typing out URL is just faster, but it depends on the URL. Also it depends on the situation and how good you are at it. In example to use the camera, I just hit one app and hold it to scan in a second. Compare this to click browser app, new tab, click url area and start typing. Maybe you make a typo or you did not, but read carefully three times so you don't land on a wrong site. Maybe its cold days and you don't like typing right now. Also helpful for people who have difficulties in typing for whatever reason. But if you were already holding the phone with the browser, then its less of a deal.
Also there is this surprise effect (as you already mentioned), which makes people curious too. It has error correction as well. So if there is a missing dot in the "i", then you don't need to try lowercase L or whatever.
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