Word Lens

I just discovered an awesome app called Word Lens.

It is an augmented reality dictionary app, that works surprisingly well.  Imagine you’re in a foreign country, Spain, for example (the only dictionary available is Spanish), and you’re at the beach. You notice no one else is at the beach.  A sign nearby says “Playa Cerrada: Reciente Ataque de Tiburón.”  You, having no previous education in the Spanish language, wonder if this sign is important and if it has anything to do with the absence of the general populace from the beach.  You whip out your iPod or iPhone, point it at the sign, and WHAM, you now know the beach is closed because of a recent shark attack!

I watched the youtube video (posted at the bottom of this article) and was impressed, so I decided to try it out for myself.  The app itself is free, but the dictionaries are a bit pricey.  However, it does come with modes to reverse words or erase words from whatever you point it at, which shows how the app works, and is kinda fun.  The dictionaries cost $4.99 each, which doesn’t seem too bad, until you realize they have “Spanish to English” and “English to Spanish” listed as two separate dictionaries.  I went ahead and bought the Spanish to English one though, just to try it out.

Results were not as good as the advertising Youtube video, but they were still good.  This app won’t work well with lots of little text; I tried it on a Spanish news website, and all the words seem to just flash between several random English words.  When I copied some of this text to my word processor and enlarged the font by a good bit, it worked without a hitch:

As you can tell, this thing doesn’t do well with grammar, but for simple signs with large text, it’s great.  This app would be an awesome addition to any world traveler’s arsenal.  Anyone who’s traveled in a foreign country without a great grasp of their language knows how useful this would be, and it works admirably for its intended purpose.

By the way, here’s the video: