Masahiro Hara
Masahiro Hara was born on August 8, 1957 in Tokyo, Japan. He studied electrical and electronic engineering at Tokyo’s Hosei University and graduated in 1980. Hara took a position at Denso Corporation, a car parts manufacturer, part-owned by Toyota. Denso also produced barcode readers and related products.
Barcodes had been used to streamline parts tracking through manufacturing and distribution. Existing barcodes had several shortcomings, including relatively low data capacity, poor damage immunity and limitations on data types. In 1992, then an engineer in Denso Wave’s R&D department, Hara was tasked with creating a new code system to overcome those limitations.
Watching a game of Go, an ancient boardgame played on a square grid with black and white stones, Hara had a lightbulb moment. “We had been making barcode readers for 10 years so we had the knowhow. I was looking at the board and thought the way the stones were lined up along the grids … could be a good way of conveying lots of information at the same time.”
Unlike traditional linear barcodes, which used a scanning laser beam and a single sensor that received the reflected light, Denso’s 2-dimensional QR (Quick Response) code is captured by an image sensor and analysed by a digital processor which converts the black and white dots to Reed-Solomon error-corrected binary numbers.
In 2014, Masahiro Hara was awarded the European Inventor Award for his groundbreaking work and August 8 has been designated world QR code day in honor of the inventor and his birthday.
Although Denso holds several patents for QR code technologies it has not sought to limit QRs for exclusive or select uses. This free availability has seen Hara’s invention widely used for diverse applications including webpage links, payment systems, smartphone apps, contact details, automated network connection and geocache puzzles.
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