Tag: qr
What Is a QR Code, and Why Are They Everywhere?
You’ve probably seen QR codes—those black and white boxes with small squares arranged in seemingly random patterns. It’s not unusual to see a QR code pop up somewhere in your daily life anymore. What’s the story behind them?
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CES 2023: Volkswagen is making a light-up EV with QR codes on it
Volkswagen’s new electric sedan is sure to turn some heads as you drive it around town. It’ll do the same for anyone inside the car, too.
The VW ID.7 (catchy name) is a new EV from the German automaker with some seriously fascinating bells and whistles. First and foremost is how it looks: a multi-colored digital camouflage pattern envelops the car while a QR code sits on the hood and both rear passenger windows.
What do the QR codes do, exactly? According to VW’s press release, they “provide an interface between the physical and digital worlds.” OK, then! More importantly, the car’s exterior features 22 distinct segments that can be individually lit up, so the car can effectively glow in the dark. You can apparently even connect it to a sound system and have the car light up rhythmically to whatever song you’re listening to.
Credit: Volkswagen
The fun doesn’t stop with the exterior, though. Get inside the ID.7 and you’ll find an augmented reality HUD on the windshield and a big 15-inch touchscreen for controlling various aspects of the interior, à la Tesla. The air vents are controlled digitally and they can direct air directly to a passenger or indirectly to parts of the car. You can even save air vent profiles for individual users.
As for other climate control odds and ends, the ID.7 can automatically detect when you’re approaching with the keys and start automatically cooling or warming itself before you get in. Oh, the steering wheel is heated, too.
It’s all very futuristic even if the light-up functions and digital camo aesthetic are a little silly. But it wouldn’t be CES without some truly off-the-wall concept cars.
Melbourne’s Anti-Graffiti QR Codes Vandalized to Point to ‘Alternative’ Site
Unfortunately, someone overlaid “a number” of those QR codes with “alternative” QR codes leading to a pro-graffiti documentary:
The City of Melbourne is investigating how many of the QR codes have been affected and is assessing whether an alternative will be needed in future…. The lord mayor said the City of Melbourne had initiated discussions with Victoria Police and would draw on CCTV footage to see “how we can catch those culprits”. […]
The Lord Mayor did not believe the compromised QR codes had resulted in more graffiti in the city. “I think this is more of a PR effort by the vandals,” she said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
QR codes were invented in 1994, with what purpose?
This Pi Pico project can generate guest Wi-Fi networks complete with QR logins
‘QR Code Menus Are the Restaurant Industry’s Worst Idea’
The QR-code menu — which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone — has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I’ll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another’s eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen. QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right — when everyone’s phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works — they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. “You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be,” Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, “but from there it’s easy to start checking texts and emails.” And wasn’t it already too easy? Friedersdorf cites the 2018 study “Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions,” where social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. What they found was that groups assigned to use their phones “enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones, primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted.”
He also notes the privacy concerns related to QR-code menus. Many of the codes “are actually generated by a different company that collects, uses, and then often shares your personal information, ” the ACLU has warned. “In fact, companies that provide QR codes to restaurants like to brag about all the personal information you are sharing along with that food order: your location, your demographics such as gender and age group, and other information about you and your behavior.”
In closing, Friedersdorf writes: “[…] I hope that, rather than remembering the pandemic as a tipping point in the digitization of restaurants and bars, we instead look back on its aftermath as the moment when an ever more atomized society better understood the high costs of social isolation, felt new urgency to counteract it, and settled on analog mealtime norms as an especially vital place to focus.”
“What if three times every day society was oriented toward replenishing what is growing more absent from the rest of our waking hours: undistracted human interactions unmediated by technology?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Revamped Steam Mobile App Lets You Sign In With A QR Code and Install Games Remotely
The Steam Mobile App has gotten a complete aesthetic overhaul and a bunch of new features to boot, including new login options and remote downloads.
As in previous releases, the Steam Mobile App enables two-factor authentication on Steam. However, more login options are now available, including scanning a QR code with your phone in the app or sign in confirmation. You can now also customize notifications, enabling you to receive notice whenever a game on your wishlist goes on sale or you get a friend request.
The app also lets you manage account details, like the PC application. You can browse community pages, news, your library, and the store on the go. None of that is new, but improvements have been made to the browsing interface and you can now download games on your PC remotely. Using the Steam Market and trading now requires confirmations, making transactions more secure in theory. The app now also can support multiple accounts and you can manage devices with access to your Steam account from the app.
Tile’s new QR stickers offer Bluetooth-free tracking for low-tech enthusiasts
Instagram just quietly added QR codes for posts
I hate to squash the hopes of QR code haters, but it appears to bet one piece of pandemic tech that’s here to stay.
Users on Instagram can now share posts, Reels, tags, and locations on its searchable Map experience through QR codes. Plenty of people hate the QR code experience thwarted onto us by the pandemic, but, as TechCrunch reported, there is reason to believe it can be effective in marketing campaigns.
QR code sharing is now an option for all users on the app. All you have to do is click the three-dot menu on any Reel, post, or location, click “QR code” on the top right, and save it to your camera roll. You can also add “/qr” to a post’s URL on a browser to generate a QR code.
Meta, the company that owns Instagram, told Mashable that they made the decision in order “to make it easier for people and businesses to share specific content.”
This isn’t an entirely new avenue for Instagram, which has allowed users to share profiles through QR codes of their profiles for years now — just take a look at the stickers dotting subway cars. (It should be noted that this original choice to add QR codes was a pretty direct copy of Snapchat at the time. Classic Instagram.) This is the first time you can do that for individual posts, though.
It’s not difficult to see who might benefit from this change. I’m thinking about musicians sharing show information, artists selling their work and, of course, restaurants (hint: users who use Instagram to make money).
Personally, I have never had the drive to share my Instagram posts via QR code.