The QR code was created to track car parts and inspired by a board game
In 1994, engineer Masahiro Hara and his team at the Japanese company Denso Wave developed the QR code to track automotive components during manufacturing. Traditional barcodes could only hold about 20 alphanumeric characters, forcing workers to scan multiple tags. Inspired by the grid strategy of the ancient board game Go, Hara designed a two-dimensional matrix that held over 7,000 characters.
The Bottleneck on the Factory Floor
In the early 1990s, automotive manufacturing plants were operating at blistering speeds, but inventory management lagged behind. Facilities supplying parts to car manufacturers relied heavily on standard one-dimensional barcodes to identify components, manage assembly lines, and track shipments. However, a traditional linear barcode had a fundamental physical limitation: it could only store about twenty alphanumeric characters along its single horizontal axis.
Because twenty characters could barely hold a basic serial number or model code, factory workers frequently had to print and scan multiple barcodes on a single carton or component box. A worker processing a single crate of parts might need to point an optical scanner at five, eight, or even ten separate barcodes to capture its full tracking data, destination, and inspection status. This repetitive scanning created severe workflow bottlenecks, increased physical fatigue, and routinely introduced scanning errors that slowed down entire assembly operations.
Finding Inspiration in a Grid Game
To resolve this issue, an engineer named Masahiro Hara and a small development team at Denso Wave, a subsidiary of the Japanese automotive component supplier Denso, set out to design a radically more efficient optical tracking system. The goal was to build a machine-readable code that could encode vastly more information while allowing scanners to read it instantly from any orientation, giving rise to the project's name: Quick Response.
While contemplating how to organize high-density information across two dimensions, Hara drew inspiration from the traditional board game Go. In Go, black and white stones are positioned strategically across a perpendicular grid to control territory. Hara realized that a two-dimensional grid of black and white square modules could encode binary information across both horizontal and vertical axes simultaneously, expanding data storage capacity by orders of magnitude compared to standard linear stripes.