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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."
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.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Okay let's see, we combine the terror of OCR with mangled language translation and the pit fall of cropped or intersecting text patches and variable fonts and multiple contexts? My hovercraft is indeed full of eels.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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
Too bad that this system only works with limited amount of texts. I installed this app on my iPod Touch and tried the default text reversing filter. If I used a Serif font, this could not read the words realiably. Fonts needed to be Sans Serif. Also this uses some dictionaries so if the word is not in dictionary (eg. deemed offensive) or some random gibberish, this could not recognize it. And all this I did with large black text on white background so viewing conditions are definitely not the issue.
I remember back in the early 90s when a guy showed me an 8Gb backup tape he had in his shirt pocket and I thought, Holy Crap, 8 GIGA-bytes fits in your pocket now? That's Awesome! And now, years later, you can carry many times that much data on a keychain. Equally Awesome. And this, this translator thing... totally and completely Awesome and Amazing. If you picture yourself as someone from say 100 years ago looking at today's world, some things we take for granted are pretty much like magic.
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!
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.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
... when he says that one of the reasons the iPhone won't run Flash is because it doesn't have the processing power.
You're telling me it can have the power needed to do something like this - analyze an image for text, decode it, put sentences together, translate, match the most appropriate font and colours, scrub the original text, render the new text at the appropriate angle and position - but not to play Flash movies. I call bullshit.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Now they just need to do the same for economically relevant languages. The top developing countries currently are Brazil, India, and China (in no particular order) and none of them speak Spanish as a primary language.
Querying wolfram alpha, the most spoken languages in the world are:
So languages #1,3,and 5 all have a completely different character set (esp. Mandarin), while #2 and #4 share the basic roman character set (with a few symbols outstanding). I can see why they went Spanish. Also, many popular travel destinations (i.e., Central and South America, Spain, etc) have spanish signs where this would be useful.
I expect much more from this company... this is an Apple-like rollout, where the novelty and usability of the first release is outstanding but limited, but it's clear there's more to come. I can't wait for the FrenchEnglish.
Imagine instant subtitling!
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
"LO TRADUCE EL TEXTO" is not a Spanish phrase, unless you want to say "Text translates it". The Spanish phrase would have been "TRADUCE TEXTO" but I think the result with that tool was so bad they changed the Spanish text until the bad translation rendered a good English phrase.
The same happens with other examples from that video such as "ROPAS OPCIONAL EN ESTA PLAYA". The only way you are going to read that sign is if you ask an English speaker to write it.
What they did was write the English phrases, translate them to Spanish and then translate them back for the video.
No, you need a small fish for that.
La traduction de anglais à espagnol est belle merdique.
I've been insisting to my wife for some time now that the way to translate anything from English to Spanish is just to add "el-" at the beginning at "-o" at the end. El-translateo! Or at least they'll get the gist of it, especially if you say it loudly enough.
I write comedy -- and get paid for it -- so there's a very good chance I understand it better than you do. If your post was an example of you attempting humor, it's clear that you're not very good at it.
The app does two things out of the gate that show it works - it has a mode that reverses words randomly, and another mode that erases random words. Both are damn impressive and show it can do what it says - so I went ahead and bought the spanish->English pack knowing I might have need of it in the future when travelling.
If you follow app sales closely (and being an iPhone developer, I take every chance I get to review trends) by far the way to make money in an app is with a free version that has in-app purchase. You have to change .99 (the minimum) and you literally get millions more people trying an application that is free than you do with an app that costs any amount of money. So I think they took the approach that will yield them far more money in the end, and also lets users have the language packs that are most useful to them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's easy. If she doesn't have a ring on her finger, she's looking. If she's not gay, you have a shot.
It is up to you to approach her. Simple as that. Walk up, and say hello...or try something like asking her the time, chat a little, then tell her "actually, I didn't need to know the time, but I saw you over here and just had to come talk to you"...and take it from there.
If she doesn't respond, well, move on to the next one...
But, if they're single, they are ALL looking for someone.
Even if they aren't single, often they are looking for someone, but I don't fsck with married chicks.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Lo traduce el texto" is definitely not grammatical in standard Spanish, because it has two direct objects: "lo" and "el texto". It might be acceptable in some dialect I haven't come across.
"Lo traduce el texto" is definitely not grammatical in standard Spanish, because it has two direct objects: "lo" and "el texto". It might be acceptable in some dialect I haven't come across.
Oh boy. This was one of the things I studied in my first year of grad school in Linguistics, so it was a long time ago. This is called "clitic doubling." I remember things being as follows:
Direct object clitic doubling in most Spanish dialects is permissible only in some conversational contexts, and IIRC depends on things like topic/focus structure of the dialogue, and parallel structure of coordinate clauses. The best examples I concocted in my research went something like this: A Pedro le mataron al hermano, a María le mataron a su madre, pero a Juan lo mataron a él. ("Peter, they killed his brother, Mary, they killed her mother, but John, they killed him"). In the final clause of that sentence, the direct object clitic doubling is in fact obligatory.
Are you adequate?
I've been researching this area for my masters. Just getting the basic text localisation (i.e. recognising an area as containing text) working reliably is very difficult - there are some good algorithms out there but in the real world, with 1000s of fonts, font sizes, angles, lighting conditions etc, I've yet to see a 1 size fits all approach. And even if you do find an area of text, throwing that into an OCR engine is going to produce garbage for the most part. In short, its quite easy to show something off in controlled conditions but I wouldn't expect anything like the performance seen in the video in the real world.
The above said, very impressed to see that on an iphone and for it to be so responsive; these things can only get better and once some form of viable HMD makes it onto the scene these types of application are going to be massive.