Custom Messages in QR Codes
QR codes are cool! The Reed-Solomon coding for error correction in them can be fairly robust, and given the appropriate QR-code format settings, enough to push in plenty of invalid (but aesthetically pleasing!) data.
I whipped one up for Computer Science House, pointing at our website and containing our logo (or, at least, my 8x8 pixel re-imagining of the logo). A slightly larger logo could be accommodated via the generation of a secondary URL for the purposes of manipulation of the raw QR code image (i.e. something akin to example.com/redirect/a6p356adfaa, which could /then/ link to csh.rit.edu in a redirect).
With this, one could theoretically generate a QR code with la large amount of bit-overlap with a logo, thus minimizing the amount that error correction has to make up for. However, the math for this is.... complex. I suppose one could easily attempt a brute-force strings-generation while generating qr-codes, and keep the one generated with the most overlap, but I have not calculated the scope of this problem, thus not having determined its feasibility.
Categories: Projects