HCCB

Overview

High Capacity Color Barcode (HCCB) is a proprietary 2D barcode technology developed by Microsoft that encodes data in clusters of coloured triangles rather than the square black-and-white modules used by QR Code and Data Matrix ². Data density is raised by drawing the triangular symbols from a palette of 4 or 8 colours, with a black-and-white (2-colour) fallback when colour reproduction is unavailable ². Microsoft positioned HCCB not as a replacement for retail UPC barcodes but as a "partner" or niche symbology for cases where a large amount of data must fit in a small printed area ¹². HCCB is best known as the underlying symbology of the consumer-facing Microsoft Tag mobile tagging service.

History

HCCB was created by Gavin Jancke, an engineering director at Microsoft Research ¹². The technology was publicly detailed on 18 December 2007 by Microsoft Research ³. Jancke characterised it as "more of a 'partner' barcode... Ours is more of a niche barcode," designed for scenarios where "you want to put a lot of information in a small space," rather than to displace conventional one-dimensional barcodes ¹. The research effort subsequently became the basis for the Microsoft Tag mobile application launched in 2009 ².

Technical specification

• Symbol shape and layout. HCCB uses coloured triangles arranged in a grid, rather than square pixels; capacity is increased by combining a different symbol shape with multiple colours per symbol ²³.
• Colour palette. The format supports 8-colour, 4-colour, or 2-colour (black-and-white) configurations, with the 8-colour palette giving the highest density ².
• Data density. Microsoft reported laboratory tests with standard off-the-shelf printers and scanners (a 600 dpi scanner) yielding roughly 2,000 binary bytes, or 3,500 alphabetical characters, per square inch in the 8-colour configuration — which Microsoft Research described as equating to "two pages of a novel" ³.
• Multiple payloads. A single symbol can store multiple individual data items, each compressed independently ³.
• Cryptographic signing. HCCB integrates digital-signing features using Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) techniques, claimed to provide RSA-1024-strength security in only 20 bytes of payload overhead ³.
• Decoding performance. Microsoft Research reported real-time decoding from a video stream — for example about 30 ms on a 200 MHz ARM processor — with the smallest symbol readable on unmodified phone cameras at a print size of roughly 3/4 inch square ³.

Use cases

HCCB was designed for identifying commercial audiovisual works such as motion pictures and video games, letting a user retrieve ratings, promotions and pricing by scanning the code with a webcam or phone camera ³. It was licensed by the ISAN International Agency for use in the International Standard Audiovisual Number (ISAN) standard ¹². Its largest real-world deployment was as the symbology behind the consumer Microsoft Tag service for magazine and advertising scanning ².

Implementations

There are no public, openly available HCCB encoder/decoder implementations. HCCB was a proprietary Microsoft technology; consumer access was mediated through the Microsoft Tag reader app and Microsoft's servers rather than an open library or specification ².

Comparison

Against QR Code, HCCB's selling point was higher data density: by adding colour as a third dimension to the 2D matrix, more information fits into the same printed area than a two-colour code allows ². However, HCCB depended on a proprietary reader and, in its Microsoft Tag form, on a cloud lookup that resolved the scanned code to publisher content via Microsoft's servers — features that the open, royalty-free QR Code did not require ². QR Code's open ISO standardisation and the lack of any licensing or server dependency are widely cited reasons it prevailed over Microsoft's proprietary approach ⁴.

In the colour-2D niche, the open successor is JAB Code (Just Another Bar Code), a polychrome 2D matrix developed by Fraunhofer SIT that, unlike HCCB, is unlicensed, open source (LGPL v2.1), has a freely available specification, and was standardised as ISO/IEC 23634 ⁵. JAB Code likewise exploits colour to raise capacity — a four-colour code roughly doubles, and an eight-colour code roughly triples, the data of a two-colour code of the same size ⁵ — but does so as an open standard rather than a proprietary, cloud-dependent system. See JAB Code.

Fun facts

• Microsoft Research likened the highest-density 8-colour HCCB to fitting "two pages of a novel" into one square inch ³.
• The same symbology underpins both a film/game licensing identifier (via ISAN) and a consumer magazine-ad scanning service, Microsoft Tag ²³.

Status

HCCB is effectively discontinued. Its main public vehicle, Microsoft Tag, was announced for shutdown on 19 August 2013 and terminated on 19 August 2015, with operations transitioned to Scanbuy's ScanLife QR platform ². No active Microsoft HCCB product or open implementation remains.

Sources

1. High Capacity Color Barcode — Wikipedia, accessed 2026
2. High Capacity Color Barcode — Liquisearch, accessed 2026
3. High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCB) — Microsoft Research, 2007
4. Microsoft Gives Up On Its Tag Barcode Service, Schedules It For Shutdown In 2015 — TechCrunch, 2013
5. JAB Code — Wikipedia, accessed 2026

Deployments

No country reports mention this standard by name.

Regions / aggregations not mapped to a single country

• Universal