Good point. There are probably several other cases where it would be handy.

Actually I had another thought about the text-recognition in conjunction with AR. Suppose you are abroad and don't know the language. There are a number of occasions when you would need to read signs, menus and what not. How about if you could point your camera at the text and get a translated version of it in your display?

Now, text translation is not easy either but there are solutions (google, babelfish etc) and they will only get better. What is remaining is basically to process the image, identify what is text in it and process that into "real" text as input to the translation algorithm. There are techniques to identify 'glyphs' in an image and associate them with virtual objects. I wonder if that technique could be refined to treat each letter in an image as a 'glyph' and associate it with corresponding "real letter" to build up a text in a software..

Does anyone have thoughts on this..?