30 years ago you could kill ducks with the NES guns instantly and it worked by detecting pixels.
I'm sure we can figure out how to analyze black squares and turn them into a number under 50ms.
QR Codes were invented by Denso (automaker own) / Toyota. For high speed assembly line processes. Lul.
I don't think people realize how limited the hardware was at the time.
They think because their phone is slow at scanning QR codes, that's how it must be. But the phone is not a dedicated device for QRCode scanning.
It's like someone saying they get blurry pics of cars on the highway so clearly speed limits are not possible to check automatically.
I'm all for the "we have technology why tf don't we use it, why aren't we better at it" argument, but the truth is that a lot of tech/systems in transport & other areas are retro af and new stuff gets shoe-horned in with all the caveats of a shoe-horning in.
Stuff doesn't get upgraded often, because it's expensive, because all of us vote for politicians that grant expensive/overpriced gov contracts putting money into them and their mates' back pockets. We'd be able to refresh public use tech all the time if it was non or low profit, never gonna happen tho.
Look at how much it cost Wales to change 30mph signs to 20mph: 34m£! And that's just for a few small areas, not everywhere they wanted to do. How in the f u c k, do you spend 34m taking down and putting up some signs? Those are ludicrous prices & all of us just completely ignore it bc we're too busy arguing about skin colour, which sex the person I sleep with is, or trans people being in the bathroom they want to be in, etc. Honestly.
None of that matter. QR code can be read on any angle because of the 3 position detection patterns it comes with, by design.
Lighting conditions are not a problem on tickets (which is what the article is about) because you can illuminate the paper from the camera.
QRCode were fast on assembly lines two decades ago. They were invented in the nineties, at a time where we had slow processors and shitty cameras.
Assembly lines give you GREAT control over where the code is located, how it's lit (consistently), and what you do on read error (can't shunt off the passenger to a read error bin, so they don't hold up the line). Rotational angle doesn't matter, perspective skew does. And then - it's a leaf of paper, so you get folds and obscured parts (yes, correctable...up to a point).
We can create live deep fakes or detect complex objects in live feeds of random webcams.
We certainly can correct a few shadows and distortions on a flat piece of paper we formatted, showing a basic symbol we designed and printed, pushed against a sensor we control, on a device we can light and shape the way we want.
NFC fails as well, you can fold the ticket just and it will break the antena.
Of course if it's a reusable ticket on a rigid medium, it won't happen. But neither for QRCode.
No variance.
People can then use nfc with their phone, which doesn't have the pollution problem.