China is not willing to leave anything out in its vast attempts to increase tourism in the country. Their newest idea is a gigantic QR code with more than 13,000 finely trimmed trees in the village of Xilinshui in the northern region of China. The organic QR code will be made with a variety of native juniper trees, varying in heights from 80 cm to 2.5 meters.
Can the code even be scanned? How low do you have to be to capture it? These are the questions that have not been answered yet. However, if you do manage to scan the code from the heights, you will be linked to Xilinshui’s tourism chat. This can either be a QR code marketing agenda or just a desperate attempt at improving public relations. Whatever the case may be, it seems to have achieved the purpose, as the news about it has reached all over the world.
Apple’s face recognition software just came out. In front of such a sophisticated technology, QR codes may sound redundant to most. A company in Japan named Orange Links came up with a brilliant use of QR codes for dementia patients. They developed QR code nail stickers that can be applied to either the finger or the toenail of a patient. These codes contain addresses, telephone numbers, and identification information of that particular patient. The idea is quite simple yet useful as 10 percent of Japan’s elderly population has dementia.
The little blocks of black and white patterns are not very widely accepted in most countries, but the scenario is different in China. They are looking to produce a cashless society, and QR codes might make the process easier. Chen Yiwen, Professor at Chinese Academy of Sciences, commented,
“China has started the transition to a cash-free economy faster than anyone could have imagined, largely because of the viral spread of two-dimensional barcod. It creates a new economy based on scannable codes.”
We will see many interesting uses of the QR codes in our lives in the future. But, as of now, there is neither a lot of creativity nor much interest in such codes. Perhaps the forest QR code in China will change things for the rest of the world as well!