Most QR codes are dull on purpose. A few are not. This gallery collects thirty that made news, set records or did something the format was never meant for. Each has a year and a source, because the QR world is full of good stories that turn out to be wrong. The last section checks two of those.
Records
Kraay Family Farm corn maze, Alberta, 2012. Guinness World Records named a maze cut into a cornfield near Lacombe the world’s largest QR code, at around 29,000 square metres. It scanned from the air (CBC).
LEGO QR code, Fiera Bolzano, 2011. A code 13.45 feet (about 4.1 m) on a side was built from LEGO bricks at a trade fair in Italy (barcode.com).
Facebook rooftop, 2012. Engineers painted a 42 ft (about 13 m) code on the roof of Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters during a hackathon so it would show up on aerial maps (Facebook Engineering).
Grain QR code, Harbin, 2018. Guinness recorded a 900 square metre code laid out in grain in northeast China (Guinness World Records).
Human QR code, Jinhua, 2019. 3,029 people stood in formation to make a scannable code, another Guinness record (Guinness World Records).
Drone QR code, Shanghai, 2021. 1,500 drones formed a scannable code in the night sky to promote a Bilibili anime event (Vice).
Smallest QR code, 2025. Researchers at TU Wien working with the storage company Cerabyte etched a code covering 1.98 square micrometres with 49 nanometre pixels, read with an electron microscope (Live Science).
Art and architecture
Ishinokoe QR tombstones, Yamanashi, 2008. A Japanese stonemason sold gravestones with a QR code that opened a memorial page where relatives could leave virtual offerings (TechCrunch).
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2008 to 2009. One of the first museums to trial QR codes on object labels, in the era when scanning still needed a special app (Cuseum).
Louis Vuitton by Takashi Murakami, 2009. The artist designed QR codes carrying his flowers and monogram, generally cited as the first “designer” codes (Hypebeast).
N Building, Tachikawa, Tokyo, 2009. The whole facade of a small commercial building is a working QR code, designed by Terada Design and Qosmo (e-architect).
Karl Marc’s animated tattoo, 2011. A Paris tattooist inked a scannable QR code for Ballantine’s that played an animation when scanned, billed as the first animated tattoo (Vice).
Takashi Murakami, “Enso: Blue”, 2013. Fine art with a functioning QR code embedded in the composition (QR Code Creator).
Advertising
Burger King’s QR Whopper, April 2020. Three TV commercials showed a code floating around the screen. Scanning it led to a coupon for a free Whopper in the BK app, 10,000 of them, during the first lockdown (Marketing Dive).
Coinbase Super Bowl advert, February 2022. Sixty seconds of a QR code bouncing around a black screen. It drew more than 20 million hits in a minute and the Coinbase app crashed (CNN).
Bring Me The Horizon, 2024. The band hid a QR code in the spectrogram of a track, visible only when the audio was viewed as a frequency plot (QR Code Kit).
Film, TV and games
Watch Dogs, 2014. Ubisoft’s game hid 16 scannable QR codes around its virtual Chicago as a puzzle trail (Prima Games).
Moon Knight and She-Hulk, 2022. Marvel’s Disney+ series hid QR codes in scenes that led to free digital comics (QR Code Generator blog).
Leave the World Behind, 2023. A map prop in the Netflix film carried a working QR code that viewers paused to scan (Capital FM).
The Penguin, 2024. Riddler flyers seen in the HBO series carried codes that scanned to in-world content (QR Tiger).
Money and stamps
Spain’s interactive stamp, 2010. Correos issued what is probably the first postage stamp with a QR code (M-Ware).
Royal Dutch Mint coins, June 2011. Gold and silver commemoratives for the centenary of the mint’s Utrecht building, with a QR code on the reverse that led to a video and the mint’s website. See the fact check below (CoinsWeekly).
USPS Miles Davis and Edith Piaf stamps, 2012. The first US stamps to carry a QR code (EcommerceBytes).
Nigeria’s 100 naira centenary note, 2014. Generally recorded as the first banknote with a QR code (Wikipedia).
Sochi 2014 Olympic stamp. Russia’s first QR-coded postage stamp (Around the Rings).
Bank of Russia 200 and 2,000 ruble notes, 2017. Each carries a code linking to the central bank’s page on that note’s security features (Moscow Times).
Ghana’s 5 cedi commemorative, 2017. A code linking to the Bank of Ghana (Numismatic News).
Science and medicine
Mass General barcoded wristbands. Massachusetts General Hospital’s move to barcoded patient wristbands is reported to have cut identification errors from 1.2% to zero (Acute Care Testing). These are barcodes rather than QR codes, but the same principle drives the QR wristbands now common in hospitals.
Penn State bee tags, 2025. Researchers glued 2.6 mm tags to about 32,000 honeybees to track them at the hive entrance. The tags are AprilTags, a QR-like fiducial marker, not true QR codes (CNN).
Protest
Hong Kong Lennon Walls, 2019. The protest posters that covered walls and underpasses often carried QR codes linking to more information and to organising channels (CNN Style).
Rickroll stickers. The long-running joke of sticking a code that opens Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” over a genuine one is recorded on the Rickrolling Wikipedia page. Harmless, but the same technique as the parking-meter scam.
Space
Lunaprise, 2024. A payload on Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander, which reached the Moon on 22 February 2024, carried nickel discs of archived data. The project’s own GitHub repository describes QR codes etched on the discs. We have not found an independent source confirming the codes, so treat this one as reported rather than verified.
Fact check
“There is a QR code on the Mars rover’s parachute.” No. Perseverance’s parachute, which opened over Mars on 18 February 2021, carried a pattern of orange and white panels. Systems engineer Ian Clark encoded “Dare Mighty Things” and the coordinates of JPL in binary in those panels, and space fans decoded it within hours (NASA JPL, CBS News). It was a binary message, not a QR code, and no phone could scan it.
“The Royal Dutch Mint made a coin with a QR code.” True. On 22 June 2011 the mint issued a silver 5 euro and a gold 10 euro coin marking 100 years of its Utrecht building, with a QR code on the reverse. The code led to a video and then the mint’s website. It won Coin of the Year in 2013 (CoinsWeekly). Earlier drafts of this page marked it as weakly sourced; the numismatic press confirms it.
▸Why the giant codes work and the tiny one is different
A QR code has no fixed size. The scanner only needs each module to cover enough pixels and the whole code to fit in frame, so a corn maze photographed from an aircraft and a 2 cm sticker are the same problem at different distances. The size versus distance rule scales all the way up. The TU Wien code is different in kind: at 49 nm a pixel it is far below the wavelength of visible light, so no camera can resolve it. It is a QR code only in layout; it is read by an electron microscope and decoded in software.
Try it yourself
Turn a code into text art or a coloured design and check that it still scans. Level H gives you the most room to play.