The QR code is breaking out of its box both physically and virtually as an increasing number of innovative new formats and uses are coming onto the scene. Take creative agency Set Japan, who have dreamed up some groovy artwork that incorporates the code itself. Its recent Frisk mints video a QR code is constructed by hand out of the tiny round mints themselves, demonstrating how codes can be displayed in 3-D.

Today anyone with a smartphone can scan and read QR codes with the click of a camera and thus access information, commercial retail links or even pictures. Unfortunately those codes are up to now not widely known or used throughout the world and are only very famous in Japan. But this is more and more beginning to change when people all over the world adjust their mobiles to the newest technical standards.