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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
...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.
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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.
On that note, this month's issue of Scientific American features an article on augmented reality. It's a good read.
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"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
Google has a cache of the PopSci article.
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?
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?
"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
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 didn't say that. We don't need to homogenize world culture for this thing to work. What gets homogenized is understanding of other cultures. Each person stays within the dialects and habits of his or her own culture, but sometimes learns a little bit about others.
Maybe if there had been something like this for America in the 50s and 60s, a Texas/Maine translator say, we wouldn't have ended up with our cultural homogeneity today. Though really, neither folks from Maine nor Texas have made many concessions to cultural homogenization.
The real evil of American cultural homogenization, such as it is, is the influence of big corporations. They'd benefit by commoditized cultural understanding, but individuals would benefit even more. So I don't see this as a call to arms for the Dark Side.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?