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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."
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
Sorry, the iPhone is the easiest platform to monetize right now. It'll almost always be the first choice for apps.
Being an android user is a lot like being a Mac user waiting for Windows games back in the day. It sucks, but that's how it is.
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'm guessing it's probably the easiest for a corporation to develop for, since the hardware is a known quantity and for the most part the OS versioning is too, you will get consistent function across devices. It will also be tested by Apple before they allow it on the app store.
Certainly a slick and quick way to get an app to market.
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
Here, try this: http://www.appbrain.com/search?q=translation
There are many to choose from. None have the cutsy, but useless superimposition upon the original, but digging around in there will find page after page of ocr and translation apps.
Lets be perfectly frank. This is an app you will use three times then forget you even have it. It is simply not useful. By the time you run around shooting pictures of signs and finally find one that says "El baño" you will have already peed your pants in Mexico.
Far more useful is Google Translate, which uses voice recognition allowing you to speak your sentence, and will then speak it back in the language of choice. (You can use text input and copy and paste from dozens of free scanner apps as well).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
"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.
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