Eli5: How do QR codes work? How does little black lines in a square hold data?
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Data in binary is just ones and zeroes. So we can do a very simple encoding simply by assuming anything black is a 0 and anything white is a 1.
Of course that doesn’t work too well on its own. We don’t know what is and isn’t data, or which way up it is. So we look for a pattern. QR codes have a square in 3 of the corners. Your phone looks for this pattern, works out how to rotate it and reads the data.
The actual data contains some extra information to correct for errors, and to indicate what type of data it is but that’s just data as well.
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