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

Monty Pythons Hungarian Translation Book

[goombah99]

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.

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:Not going to lie

[mveloso]

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.

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

[icebike]

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).