Masahiro Hara

Masahiro Hara is the person who led the development of the QR code as an engineer in a division of Denso (now Denso Wave). The QR code, announced in 1994, came out of a development team of just two people. Denso Wave's account of the QR code's development records that the result was a code that could be read more than 10 times faster than other codes.

In 2014, he received the Popular Prize of the European Inventor Award.

For the development team, the biggest challenge was how to read the code at high speed. The 1:1:3:1:1 ratio of the finder pattern was chosen as a pattern that is unlikely to appear in printed matter. This design allows a scanner to work out the position of the QR code within an image.