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

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

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: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.