Word Lens — Augmented Reality Translation 203
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."
Too bad that it does not work very well (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Not going to lie (Score:5, Informative)
Here, try this: http://www.appbrain.com/search?q=translation [appbrain.com]
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 [appbrain.com], 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).
They are cheating from the start (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:This shows how full of shit Steve Jobs is (Score:4, Informative)
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.