I’ll cut to the chase with this one. Word Lens is a very cool concept for an mobile app by Quest Visual. It basically utilizes some sort of sorcery to translate real world sign-age on the fly through the camera lens of your iPhone.
Right now it only does English to Spanish and Spanish to English but, well, take a look for yourself first:
Mind = Blown, right?
After watching this video, we excitedly downloaded the app in hopes of turning our iPhone into a magical Rosetta Stone from the future. Unfortunately we hit a couple of snags.
1) The app is currently up on the App Store and is free, but you’ll need to purchase a $4.99 add-on within the app for each translation dictionary you want. (ie English->Spanish is $4.99, Spanish->English is another $4.99)
2) There’s a couple of demonstration modules included with the free app – “word reverser” and “word eraser.” None of these worked very well. Granted, this is just on a 10 minute spree around the apartment trying to look at any book or poster with big block letters, but it was a pretty big buzzkill to not see any magic performed by the phone.
We’ll update you if we get better luck on real signs outdoors, but either way, there’s no denying that Word Lens is an incredibly cool idea.
Developer Otavio (who’s got a great 80′s informercial hairdo btw) explains Word Lens:
