This week the Victorian Government joined a growing list of states who have introduced their own QR code systems.
It follows in the footsteps of South Australia, New South Wales and the ACT, who have also introduced the technology to help businesses collect customer information for contact tracing.
But what is a QR code? And why have they suddenly sprung into the limelight, almost three decades since they were first invented?
Barcodes, but better
Technologist and CEO of Fickle, Simon Raik-Allen, said the technology was pretty similar to barcodes.
"The square has on it black and white spots, and cameras can identify the spots, and in those spots are encoded numbers," Mr Raik-Allen said.
He said this year that data has often contained a web address, so customers scan the QR code with their phone and are linked to a website where they can enter their personal information.
While barcodes can only contain around 20 characters, QR codes can contain around 7,000.
"A barcode is one-dimensional, there are lines and each line represents a number, and there are 20 lines," Mr Raik-Allen said.
"Whereas a QR code is two-dimensional, so it goes up and down so it can contain a lot more information.
"And what really makes that QR code special is its ability to be read much much faster than a regular barcode."
Hence the name, 'Quick Response' code, shortened to QR.
Mr Raik-Allen said QR codes were originally invented by a Japanese manufacturing company in 1994.
It was particularly useful to the Japanese because their Kanji character set contained over 50,000 characters, which could not be accommodated by a barcode.
Niche technology goes global
"It was originally used in manufacturing in Japan in the car industry," Mr Raik-Allen said.
"As pieces of cars went past, high-speed cameras would be able to look at these QR codes and detect which part of it was going past."
QR codes became an open standard in 2000, meaning they are free and accessible for anyone to use.
And while they had a brief moment of prominence in the early 2000s, Mr Raik-Allen said they still remained relatively obscure until Apple built the technology into its camera a few years ago.
"Before that you actually had to install it in the app, and that's a real hassle," Mr Raik-Allen said.
"But once it's now ubiquitous, it's in the phone camera, and some of them are doing the same thing with Android platforms, so you just point your phone at it, and it's becoming very convenient."
Contact tracing made easy
This year QR codes have become widely used by many businesses to collect customer information for contact tracing teams.
Owner of Bendigo's Botanical Hotel and Warracknabeal's Creekside Hotel Sally Gebert started using the technology this year for both collecting customer details and ordering.
"If there was an outbreak we store the information for 28 days, and DHHS contact us and we can just send off an excel spreadsheet within a minute or two of them asking, and they've got all the contact tracing details for everybody that was on premise," Ms Gebert said.
Ms Gebert estimated about 85 per cent of customers were able to scan the QR code with their phones, but there were some who found the technology confronting.
"It was a bit overwhelming, so we really had to work with our team to coach people on how to use a QR code and that it was easy, it was okay," she said.
Ms Gebert said she would continue using QR codes for ordering post-COVID.
"We are finding that the average spend is probably up, and they are buying better drinks because they have time to sit and have a look," she said.
"It's probably the way of the future, I think more and more businesses will start adopting it."
