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Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by heroprotagonist on Saturday September 16, 2017 @06:46AM (#15264015)
I tried two QR readers on the photos in the article. They did not detect the code.

Would it have been much more effort for the photographer to take a photo that was scannable? Or is there just too much variance in the arrangement and no reader would actually scan it even without a photo?

Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by frumiousirc on Saturday September 16, 2017 @09:13AM (#15264521)
Barcode Scanner on Android gives:

http://weixin.qq.com/r/WD-i_pfE3sqhrdOZ92pK

Visiting that link simply forwards me to

http://www.wechat.com/mobile/en/

Rather anticlimactic.

Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by paradite on Saturday September 16, 2017 @09:29AM (#15264576)
That is exactly working as intended.

You need to install WeChat and use the app to scan it to go the official account of the tourism office.

Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by TeMPOraL on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:19AM (#15264308)
Might be a problem with the combination of your monitor and your phone camera. I tried Barcode Scanner on Android, and it scanned it without a hitch. Hell, I had more trouble scanning a QR code I hand-drawn in blue on white paper...
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by heroprotagonist on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:01PM (#15267453)
Huh, that's kind of odd. I use QR codes for lots of other things and they are successful, though the images are typically more clear.
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by vayan on Saturday September 16, 2017 @10:05AM (#15264692)
It's Chinese, if there's a QRCode you need to use Wechat. I tried and it's working fine.
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by jfries on Saturday September 16, 2017 @07:17AM (#15264089)
For what it's worth, "Barcode Scanner" on Android was able to scan it effortlessly.
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by userbinator on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:29AM (#15265048)
An old QR app I had for a long time (from when QR codes were first introduced, many years ago) failed to read it too. Some of the bits look ambiguous too --- e.g. taking the upper left corner bit of the upper left locator square to be (0,0), what's the bit at (16,11)? It's both noticeably darker and lighter than its neighbours, like it was cut out and then grew back slightly.

Those which can't read the code probably use traditional thresholding to reduce the input into 0-1 first, while those which can are using some variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft-decision_decoding algorithm.

It doesn't help either that the middle was blanked out, eating into the error correction budget.

Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by lvsun on Saturday September 16, 2017 @07:45AM (#15264181)
I scanned it with WeChat and the public WeChatID of the company popped out - haomengshenghuo, whose direct translation of english is: life with good dreams.
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by kalleboo on Saturday September 16, 2017 @08:18AM (#15264301)
It worked with the scanner in the built-in camera app in iOS 11, but I had to manually adjust the brightness (issue with scanning off a computer screen?)
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by JCharante on Saturday September 16, 2017 @11:31AM (#15265058)
It worked for me just fine using the QR Scanner on Wechat for QR code that leads to the "village's tourism account on WeChat".
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by teekert on Saturday September 16, 2017 @10:40AM (#15264819)
It worked for me. Opens wechat in the Play store.
Re:Chinese maze: Village makes giant QR code from trees by jpindar on Saturday September 16, 2017 @02:07PM (#15265782)
QR Droid worked fine.

So did Google Goggles.