Word Lens — Augmented Reality Translation

Barence writes "PC Pro has a review of a new augmented reality iPhone app that translates from Spanish to English on the fly. 'Point the camera at a decent-sized chunk of Spanish text and within a couple of seconds you'll get a rough and ready translation,' said the reviewer. 'And most magnificently of all, the translation is overlaid, at the correct size, on the original object.' The team behind the project has produced a video of Word Lens in action."

Comments

Not going to lie

[FredFredrickson]

This is pretty damn cool. But no android app. No news if they plan on releasing one. In fact, their site is pretty void of any information at all. I would buy this just to play with it, but I'll never be an iphone guy.

Re:Not going to lie

[Stele]

Also, the API is basically C (Objective C++). I had no trouble pulling in a ton of my existing C++ imaging code and just compiling it right up, layering a nice UIKit UI over it.

I have an Android phone, but I'll have to learn Java and *PORT* my C++ code to it.

the cool thing is that it's so cheap

[alen]

i remember the days when all the new cool tech was only seen in the government and large corporations first and then trickled down to us peons. these days with our rampant consumerism it's the opposite. we see cool stuff like this first and it's cheap and the big boys are now playing catch up because things move so fast

if it wasn't for our vane consumerism this would be a government project costing tens of millions of $$$ in R&D and the devices would be single use devices that also cost some ridiculous amount of money

Re:Monty Pythons Hungarian Translation Book

[wjousts]

Indeed. Sometimes a bad translation is worse than no translation since it might convince you that you do actually understand the foreign text.

The killer app for augmented reality

[psydeshow]

These guys just opened a gold mine.

I'm sure there will be a ton of cynical and jaded comments here, but this is a working prototype of augmented reality that is actually immediately and unquestionably useful, even in its infant state. Even non-technical people can see the promise of this, and graspable promise equals investment.

Bravo, and congratulations to the developers!

Another story about how badly it works

[smooth wombat]

Just read this on MSNBC. The author shows what happens when trying it on basic Spanish.

Overall, not worth the money until it gets heavily reworked.

Re:Another story about how badly it works

[pushing-robot]

In the future it would be nice if sign makers were required to include a data matrix in some corner, and put various translations into an online database. That way, any device with the most rudimentary camera and data service could translate it accurately, and it would be a lot cleaner than putting multilingual signs everywhere.