now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

well not really but the app is great, if its real...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMkfgFsdPA8

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/word-...383463868?mt=8

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

nice.........

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

I'm not often all that impressed with iPhone apps, since I mainly use Androids, but this is an impressive app. (It speaks less to the iPhone than the app's author, but still...)

VERY nice. This gets use closer to that ubiquitously useful device that bridges fluid communication with other people, even with other languages, and quite possibly allows you to be that much more self-sufficient even when you're visiting another country.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

You'll use this how often?

Get a REAL spanish or foreign language sign and you'll see it will provide a mis-translation, which can sometimes be as bad as non at all, giving you incorrect information.

The video showed english phrases that were word for word, translated to spanish, and then translated back.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

It's not about the frequency or even accuracy, it's about the immediate utility in a situation. You're clearly correct about mis-translations but if you're in a serious pinch and need a clue, knowing that it might be a loose translation, it could be very terribly useful. More importantly, it's about the potential for augmented reality and translation services and what we can probably expect for the future.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

There is still PhototoTranslator for the N900 which is a frontend to the Google's Tesseract OCR program and Google Translate: http://www.cybercomchannel.com/?p=63
I guess it could support even more languages than Spanish and English if you can get it work on your phone. The online translation could probably easily replaced with some downloaded dictionaries.

Cheers, M.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

The method you're suggesting sounds a lot more like Google Goggles (see a hands-on article), far less immediately useful than WordLens.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

reminds me of the movie THEY LIVE
put the damn sunglasses on!!!

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

NOOOOOOO!! *PUNCH!*
ARRGH!!! *rolls around, punching and wrestling*


hehe... I love that movie. Especially for that scene.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

haha yeah the long punch up in the back lane is all i can really remember from the movie now that i think about it!

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

Went from awesome app to awesome movie in record time.

http://www.webdesign-guru.co.uk/icon...s/approved.gif

I approve of this thread.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

Hilarious. :)

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

This app is close to magic.
I'm impressed.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

I agree. It's actually far more visually impressive considering it aligns the text along the original text font's baseline... makes it TRULY look augmented far better than most augmented reality apps I've tried on Android.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

As cool and impressive as this is, and it is cool and impressive, let's chat about the magical details.

You'll notice the fps is definately less than 25, probably closer to 15. With the coprocessors in the latest iOS devices, that's plenty of time to do some good number crunching. Also, iOS is already gearing up to be the first handheld OS with a mature OpenCL implementation, so expect augmented reality to be common place.

The fonts and solid backgrounds are an OCR library's wet dream.

The to and from language translation has to be specified. That takes plenty of heat off the OCR.

Still very, very cool.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

Both PhotoTranslate and Google Goggles require way too many steps to be useful, the beauty of WordLens is its simple and instantaneous.

I'd love to see more examples of real-life use before I get too excited, though. How does it handle less-than-ideal lighting conditions, weird fonts, skewed angles, something that's graphically busy like an overdecorated restaurant menu, etc, etc.

Still, this is one of those amazing apps which will make augmented reality go mainstream in the next year or so. I can't wait to get my cyborg eye implants.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

Nice! Though I'd guess it's a serious battery hog.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

As iHate Apple (not the hardware, the company and its M.O.), I seldom venture out to congratulate how Apple, against all odds, once again, revolutionized mobile phones/app store/video calling/UI/sliced bread/breathing. This however, looks fantastic. Yes, it probably has some limitations, even ones that might make it unusable under some circumstances, but you have to give it to the developer(s), a fantastic job!

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

I wouldn't attribute credit specifically to Apple for this. Any other modern phone could have done this. The credit really goes to the hardware capabilities in most of these new phones and to the authors of the software to have mashed up all these capabilities in an attempt to make a truly useful tool with a very intuitive and fluid natural interface for real-life, real-time translations.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

Since I don't have an N900, can anybody tell me whether there are any similar augmented-reality apps that work with Maemo (especially if they seem likely to end up in MeeGo)?

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

Nothing? :P Is the N900 lacking augmented reality apps?

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

i remember seeing this one months ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWPNN...D99B7&index=12
but still no sign of a releae

and theres this one, still not for end users though:(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f96dOZp3_sU

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

Thanks! I'll have to watch them when I get home (work blocks the toobage). I'm sort of surprised there aren't more on this platform. It's been out for so much longer and has a far better camera than most phones that are doing these things with far less.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

This is a great app but I wouldn't want to be stuck with a CrApple device again just to use it (I fell for the iPhone1).
The app could just as easily been created for the N900 rather than the iGroan, but the large market share of AnFroid and CrApple make the N900 unprofitable for software companies (QT compatibility could improve this a bit). Why pay a developer to port to Maemo if the product won't sell well enough to cover the pay for that developer?
You know, stating the obvious!

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

The YouTube video has been removed by the user.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

That first video isn't "augmented reality", it's just 3D headtracking--there's no overlaying over live visuals from the real world.

The second is precisely what I was looking for!

It seems to me as if, in both cases, the N900 is a tad slow--it sort of ruined the 3D and augmented effects to have such a delay--but it's probably still very early for this device.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

That is nothing. By far the coolest thing on any mobile yet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYvTJnWrH2Q

shame its on the iPhone.

Re: now this makes me wanna buy an iphone!
 

It is now on Meamo as well:-

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...ighlight=drone

Just a pity the drone apparently costs $299 to buy itself!