20
Feb
unnamed

WordLens Gets A Huge 2.0 Update With A Holo UI, No More Flickering Issues, German Translation, And Bug Fixes Galore

Posted by in Applications, Apps/Games, News

WordLens is one of those borderline-magical apps that make me feel like I'm living in a scifi novel. The initial release was a little buggy, and the UI made it clear the app was a direct port from iOS. The 2.0 update just dropped, though, and it takes care of a lot of those issues.

2013-02-20 20.30.27 2013-02-20 20.29.53 2013-02-20 20.33.37

If you've never heard of WordLens, here's the deal: hold your phone up to a sign or some other thing with words on it, and WordLens uses your camera to translate those words to another language of your choosing in real time. The translations are overlaid on top of the live camera feed, which is kind of a wow moment (when it works).

09
Aug
translatetiny

Google Translate Gets Bumped To v2.5, Adds Live Updating And Image Translation

Posted by in Applications, News

Google Translate, the frequently-overlooked wonder app of the 3rd millennium, got some new features today. Chief among them is an amazing new image-based translation mechanism. The app now supports use of your camera to take a picture of the text you would like to translate. Once that's done, just "brush" over the word or phrase you need to read and Translate will do what it says on the tin: render that text in your preferred language. It's not quite WordLens' live view, but then, if you've ever used WordLens' pause feature, you know that slowing things down a bit might actually be helpful.

06
Jul
image

Word Lens Finally Comes To Android, And It Works Surprisingly Well As Long As You Aren't Epileptic [Hands-On]

Posted by in Applications, News, Videos

I first saw Word Lens for iOS on TechCrunch back in 2010 and instantly fell in love with the concept - just point the camera at foreign words, and all of them get translated in front of your very eyes, live. Amazing, isn't it? If you haven't seen this promo video yet, watch it first:

Every month since, I searched the Play Store for Word Lens, hoping its developers brought it to our favorite OS, but found nothing. Eventually, during my trip to Spain, I started using CamDictionary, which did a decent job but was too cumbersome to use and lacked many words in the dictionary.