You’re in a restaurant in another country, trying to figure out the dishes on the non-English menu. You take out your iPhone, take a video of the item you might want, and the application turns the dish into English in real time. But in true 21st century fashion, the English words actually replace the foreign-language words on the menu in the image you are watching — in real time.
The new application is called Word Lens. While the app itself is free, it can’t do anything useful without the in-app dictionaries, which are $4.99 each until the end of this month, at which point they’ll be $10 each. The software works on the iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, or iPod touch with video camera. Currently, only Spanish to English translation, or vice versa, is offered. No Internet connection is required during translation.
‘Mind-Bending’
Released Wednesday by San Francisco-based QuestVisual, the app is already causing a wave of favorable buzz. It was developed by QuestVisual cofounders Otavio Good and John DeWeese over two and a half years.
Although only in the iTunes App Store for a day, the app is already in ninth place among the top free apps.
When the app replaces the text in the image with the translated version, the font style, color and perspective are also matched. Some reviewers have described the app’s performance as “augmented reality,” while others simply prefer the term “magic.”
Blogger John Gruber, writing on Daring Fireball, said the app “seems impossible” and called it “mind-bending.” It’s as if, he continued, “near-future time travelers started sending us apps instead of terminators.”
Clear Text Best
Some reviews have noted that the translated words tend to wiggle somewhat, or switch between the two languages or between translation variations, but this can be reduced by holding the camera steady.
Additionally, reports indicate that the translation tends…