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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.
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
"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.
Much as I hate apple.. I hate flash more. And it wouldn't surprise me if what you described _is_ actually less resource intensive than flash.
I have a higher-end quad core i7 and 12GB ram .. playing a flash video makes all 4 cores work and uses a rediculous amount of ram.
I call your bullshit. I don't ever recall Steve Jobs saying that the iPhone does not have the processing power to run Flash. He has said that Flash is buggy, crashes often, and does not have good performance in mobile devices. (All of which I agree with.)
Basically, his position has been that Flash is too crappy for the iPhone, irrespective of whether the iPhone can run it or not.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
"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?