It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment QR codes became a joke. Was it the guy who scanned one of those black and white squares on the back of a Heinz bottle and landed on a page full of porn videos? Or when Gillette ran an ad inviting you to scan a code to "read Kate Upton's mind"? Maybe it was the codes plastered around the New York City subway, across the tracks, making it impossible to scan them without killing yourself. No, you know what? It was when the Kraay Family Farm carved 309,000 square feet of QR code into a corn field. That's when it happened. That or the tombstones.

Before that, though, QR codes seemed like a window to the future. Just point your camera, scan the code, and instantly check into your favorite place on Foursquare. At least, that was the idea. More often it went like this: Point your camera, remember your phone's camera doesn't do QR scanning on its own, download another app, open that app, point the camera, scan the code, and end up on some corporate website that's not even optimized for your phone. Few people ever scanned a code; fewer did twice. QR codes live on in the wild, but they're like pay phones: a reminder of how things used to be.

Don't look now, but QR codes have begun to creep back. They have different names now—Snap Codes and Spotify Codes and Messenger Codes and Other Things Codes—and a much improved sense of style, but the idea hasn't changed. Because QR codes, it turns out, were just ahead of their time. They required a world where everyone always had their phone, where all phone had great cameras, and where that camera was capable of doing more than just opening websites. Over the last few years, both the underlying technology and the way people use it have caught up to QR codes. Before long, scanning codes will feel as natural as thumbing your fingerprint to unlock your phone. And the rise of QR codes will bring augmented reality into your life in all sorts of previously impossible ways. QR codes aren’t a failure from the past. They’re the future. For real this time.

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The WeChat Way

The second wave of QR codes started around 2014, when Evan Spiegel went to China. The young Snapchat CEO had long been fascinated with WeChat, the messaging app that dominates the online lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese users.