QR Codes: Cities & Eyes

In 2010, 350 billion digital photos were taken. In 2020, we will capture 1.4 trillion. Of the top-ten free apps on the App Store, five treat the camera as the central object. Two others (Facebook and Messenger) rely on the content produced by cameras, though less directly.

Once we enter the always-on reality of AR glasses, filtering will become more important. Users will want to decide which companies’ offers appear automatically, which they never want to hear from, and which should manifest conditionally. We will need a sort of AdBlock for our eyes.

The QR code is a shape-shifter, a jack-of-many trades. Scan the monochrome box and engage with a number of possibilities: the prompting of a URL or vCard, the revelation of a message or image, the scanning of a ticket, the movement of data.

Egoditor, a company providing QR generation technology, reported a 25x increase in restaurant customers post-outbreak, along with a 7x uptick among hotels.

As adoption increases, there will be room for companies that organize the chaos. Once a sufficient ubiquity is reached, we will need to categorize, curate, and filter QR codes. The first of these products might look a lot like Pocket, just for the physical world. We may wish to store a list of books we want to read, the people we’ve met, or the dis... See more

But while the camera became the de facto method for content creation long-ago, for capturing reality, it has never served as the best method for interrogating it. To pull up information about the monument you’re standing in front of, you navigate to Google and ask a question. To see how well-regarded the restaurant you just passed is, you visit Map... See more

As it happens, Ant and Alibaba were critical to spreading the gospel of the QR code. With low credit-card adoption in China, Ma saw an opportunity to leverage the comparatively common mobile phone as a means of transaction. Today, QR code scanning accounts for the majority of digital payments in the country.

M-Pesa — available in Kenya, South Africa, Afghanistan, and four other markets — has added QR scanning to their traditional text-payment method. Venmo, the scrubby-but-popular PayPal property, has done the same stateside.