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