QR Experimentation

So I did a lot of experimenting with manipulating QR codes and seeing if they would still read. I discovered a lot of things, the biggest being that it is nearly impossible to manipulate the three large "target" areas any more than changing the shape (e.g. from square to circle) without making them unreadable. It seems that the inner parts of the code are much more lenient with manipulation. Check it out!

note: all of these were tested on my android

So I started basic, changing everything from squares to circles and adding color to the b/w. This read just fine.

So then I tried to just live trace it in illustrator to see what would happen. It did not like this.

So I went back and changed the two color to multi-colored. It did not read.

I had a suspicion the former didn't read due to the lightness of the yellows and therefore changed all of the yellows to other colors. It worked!

Then I started experimenting with the "target" areas. This did not go well.

I tried the outside only, the inside only and the middle ring only.

This one in particular baffled me. It read, but it read the WRONG thing! It thought the QR was referring to something else, which was extremely interesting to me.

So then I started in with type. this worked fine.

This did not.

This didn't work either. I tried a few variations of the placement on this just to see if there were certain "target" areas within the inside that I was blocking but none of these seemed to work.

Then I got the idea to just use really loose shapes and see if it would work when I was pretty sloppy about it. It did.

This led me to try using characters instead of blocks of color. This first one didn't work.

I suspected it might be because the letters weren't covering enough 'ground' where the squares/circles used to be so I used a bold style....it worked!

Then I tried just changing little things like color and letters in it, it worked fine but it's not very readable for that purpose.

Then I wondered if I could do a kind of mash up of the letters/a little randomness and while it took longer than the others had to read, it did eventually get it.

Then I wanted to try the big letters on the targets again and see if it would work if i could close out the letters with color so that you could still read the letters but the scanner would pick up on the "target." Nada.

I figured it was due to the "S" but even after cutting out part of it to make white space inside, it still wouldn't read.

All in all, I think I got a lot out of this exercise and have kind of figured out some of the boundaries of manipulating QR.