In the Chinese province of Hebei, in the city of Baoding created a massive quick response code.
A new Chinese tourism campaign has used 130,000 juniper trees to form a giant QR code that is viewable from the air. The quick response code was formed in a large tree field within a northern village.
The trees are shaped into a QR code that is completely functional and that is meant to boost local tourism.
Each of the giant QR code’s sides is about 745 feet long. The evergreen juniper trees are native to northeast Asia. They are each around 2.5 feet to 8 feet tall. While the QR code can be scanned, it isn’t necessarily easy to do. After all, it would require someone to be flying directly over it and with a barcode reader app open and ready to read the square at the right height. Still, once the barcode is scanned, the smartphone or tablet user is automatically directed to the village’s public WeChat tourism account.
The giant QR code is in the village of Xilinshui, which is a part of the city of Baoding in Hebei province.
Xilinshui has been working hard on developing its image and drawing visitors. In 2015, it was named “the most beautiful village in Hebei.” As a result of that title, it received a grant of $168,000 (1.1 million yuan) from the provincial government. It used these funds in order to further develop and renovate itself to boost its appeal even more.
The most recent component of that effort includes this unique PR stunt. The hope is to draw more attention than actual barcode scanners, as people are drawn to visit the quick response code from both the air and the ground.
The giant QR code is a part of a rapidly growing craze in China. There are many different businesses and organizations employing the barcodes for various reasons. These include everything from mobile payments to bike rentals and even displaying them on homes in remote villages in order to help local governments to better keep track of their own people. Making large sized QR codes has also become quite the phenomenon as advertisers, marketers and developers frequently attempt to break records in order to draw attention to their causes or products.
