Slashdot Mirror
Point, Shoot and Translate into English
edstromp points out this New York Times "story on using a pocket pc to translate a street sign. It requires at least a dialup connection as it sends the photo to a server for the majority of the processing: OCR, translation, English overlay for new image, and then transmission back to the user. All said and done, it takes about 15 seconds to translate a street sign. Put this with some augumented reality, and you have a rather useful tool."
-Miko
Miko O'Sullivan
Go to News.com and click the link on the right side of the page that says "Does your PDA parler français?". It is video for a translation device. It's pretty amazing.
The guy was talking into it in English and this thing repeats the words in the selected language.
I'm sure it's far from perfect, but this thing is like one step closer to some Star Trek like technology in regards to translation.
...Would be a similar system that can use OCR to read street signs and then send the text to a voice synthesyzer. Seems like that would be endlessly useful for people with low vision who have trouble reading signs in awkward locations.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Combine this technology with last summer's craze, hotornot.com, and I think you got something. (15 seconds to know if the chick you wanna pick up in a bar is really hot? Priceless.)
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
How long till' people will drive using this as input? "Computer: what is that red sign over there?" ... crunch scan crunch ocr crunch exception: macromedia plugin required crunch downloading... ... 15 seconds later, from the car's wreckage: IT'S A STOP SIGN. REPEAT IT'S A STOP SIGN
On that note, this month's issue of Scientific American features an article on augmented reality. It's a good read.
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
Driving down the street...
What's that sign?
*click* (take a photo)
*CRASH! BOOOM!*
Translation comes in: "STOP" sign
...just imagine visiting some far-away place, sending of a picture of a street-sign for translating, and getting back "beware the polar bears"!
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
I was messing with the Prototype for this, and after I tried about the 40th sign, I got this back
I LITY ****
Warning !
Wrong Way
**** HELPI'MBEINGHELDPRISONERINAWIRELESSTRANSLATINGFAC
Go Back
Google has a cache of the PopSci article.
...can you get through the airport with it? Carry any more technology and those security guards will tear you apart.
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
What, are you suggesting that the Babel Fish is fictional?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
OK, maybe translating train schedules and restaurant menus is good. But street signs, especially, are supposed to be unambiguous, their meaning readily apparent to anyone, whether literate in their native language or not.
And does this thing work on signs that some redneck has shot holes in with a 12-gauge?
In the 1950s and 60s, TV commoditized and homogenized American speech patterns and culture. This will commoditize understanding between cultures, but nobody has to give up their native language. Ideas and commerce will flow more easily. It'll be a good thing.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
On a somewhat related topic I have been thinking about recently:
Java (J2ME) is now in cell phones, I have one and have played around a bit. Biggest problem with real applications is lack of a good input device. Now, for speed dialing, my phone has "voice recognition", which is really a pattern match against a saved database of me saying each person's name. It is an i85 Nextel Phone.
Why not have a voice recognition processor? Now, the phone does not have enough horsies to crunch the stuff needed to do that...but: The phone has direct-connect. Why not a feature like direct connect, but instead of 2-way radioing another person, a voice processor system, which returns the processed speech as text into whatever is running on the phone? Take the time used out of alloted minutes...it's not like they have to connect anything in your call to the phone system to establish a call for you.
Data connection is only about 300 baud or so, but how much faster can you really talk (so that a computer can uderstand you) than 300 baud worth of text? Same thing for reading. I can't read my email while driving (at least not safely), but why not have a "my phone" (really a computer talking to my phone) read it to me? That solves the small screen display problem too.
Ok, enough crazy thinking for now, I could go on and on about this stuff.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
What do you do if you're trying to read signs that would lead you to a cybercafe?
I'm suprised that nearly nobody has carried the story of the brown reaserchers who put a microchip into a monkey's brain which allowed them to control a computer mouse by thinking
0 01-02/01-098.html
They first played a game with a joystick, then played the same game controlling it with their mind, and they got about the same score both ways
Very interesting story.....has anybody seen anything on this? It's on brown's website at http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2
I'm on a business trip in Paris. My wife flys in to be with me. Fourteen hours later I show up at the airport.
Wife: "Where the hell have you been!!!"
Me: "server was slow..."
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
... Just stay out of Canadian Airports, eh?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
In the book, they were earbuds.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
- books written in english
- product labels written in english
- movie subtitles written in english
- magazine articles written in english
then, after my 12 years of state funded black-ops training, i decided to continue my education in a private 4 year institution where they even taught me how to WRITE in english, a topic which wasn't quite covered well by the state-funded institution. perhaps if the government would make this type of training available to all members of our society, we wouldn't need computers to understand these cryptic road signs that nobody seems to be able to decode.-c
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Why not allow the OCR program, and any necessary foreign language translation dictionaries to live in the PDA's memory? I can't see it taking up anymore than several MB, (which could certaintly be offloaded when not traveling).
Is there something I really don't understand here?
It could happen.
-Miko
Miko O'Sullivan
Try to wear it through airport security! (The last thing your LCD goggles/speakers report is "Pleeze come this w4y to thiz small priv4t3 roam so that we might radish you." Uhoh.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I know this is a little bit off topic, but while the technology is cool, you'd get some really kooky translations if you went around some foreign country translating the signs. I used to live in Japan, and after I learned a little of the language, I started thinking that the Japanese have very odd naming schemes. My house was loaced between the train stops "Cherry Blossom Palace" and "Happy Island" and I lived on the street "Middle of the rice field" right across from the megamart "Big Circle". Needless to say, there were neither palaces nor islands anywhere in sight, and the closest thing to a "field" was the parking lot, and I never saw any rice there... I did see some circles, but none of them were particularly large :) Still, I'll bet it would be great for reading menues in korean resturants and finding out just which part of the cow that last slice of beef came from... or I HOPE it was a cow!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
"Dear, what does that sign over there say?"
[15 seconds later]
"It says: 'Road ends: Bridge constru...'"
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
"Hey, what does that one say?"
"Hold on, I'll check."
(a few seconds pass)
SCReeeeeeeeeeechh!!!!
"Um, this says it was a stop sign."
"Thanks."
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
...with a picture of a beautiful, but clothed, member-of-the-appropriate-sex.
Liberty uber alles.
Just about every meaningful sign in Tokyo station is already translated into English. In fact, there are few train stations within a 50-mile radius of Tokyo that don't have English language signs, at least for the essential stuff (this way to Harajuku, etc.). It's only when you start getting out in the country that reading signs becomes a problem for English-speaking foreigners. E.g. most stations on the Meitetsu line outside of Nagoya completely lack English-language signs. As a tip for foreign travellers in that situation I offer the following advice: follow the crowd. You are pretty much guaranteed by natural law to end up in the city center.
i got a device that fills your requirements. it tells me what street i'm on, what street i'm approaching and even what time it is! and it doesnt even need to be able to see the street signs. of course, it needs to be able to see at least 3 of its friends to know exactly where i am, but that isnt too hard when you're outside.
i of course am talking about my GPS.