The return of the QR Code during the pandemic

Forgotten for years, the QR Code seems to have found a second youth in these months of the Covid-19 pandemic. When no one wanted to come into contact with objects and surfaces, bars and restaurants dusted off the two-dimensional barcode to allow their customers to navigate the menus using their smartphones.

In the United States, Paypal and Venmo have introduced contactless payment methods based on QR Codes, while the healthcare company CVS has announced its intention to bring them to over 8000 stores by the end of the year. In the coming months it will be possible to use QR Codes within a series of apps capable of exporting users' medical records to determine if they will be able to return to the office, enter a store or board a flight.

If this flashback seems strange to us, more than half of the population in China used contacless payment methods based on the QR Code as early as 2017. Invented in 1994 by a subsidiary of Toyota, the original purpose of the code was to help car manufacturer to keep track of auto parts produced with an archive capacity higher than the classic barcode. The QR Code remained confined to industrial use until 2010, when smartphones finally introduced a function that was able to read them.