Introducing Word Lens • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#31

Post by exogen » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 1:52 AM UTC

cpr wrote: post #22

The promo video's gotta be a fake--figuring out the fonts used & fitting in the same space with perfect color, etc.? Nope. Would like to see what it really does.

The color matching is easy. It's not using the same fonts, and pretty obviously stretching the text to take up the approximate amount of line space - also easy. Don't be too quick to judge! :)

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#32

Post by revorad » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 1:54 AM UTC

This is one of those times you have to admit it's not ALL about the execution. Good ideas do matter. And they are rare.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#33

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 1:54 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#34

Post by ugh » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 1:55 AM UTC

ianferrel wrote: post #28

I downloaded it immediately. Making it free to try and selling the dictionaries is a great sales model. The demo mode does a mirror-image reversal of the word to show you that it can detect words. I was using a 4th gen iPod Touch, so lower-res camera and no flash. Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to work as well as I'd hoped. I tested physical copies of a few things: 1. Mac OS X Snow Leopard cd case. Black san…

The current iPod touch has only a very low res, low quality camera (I think VGA or maybe a bit better, in any case less than 1 MP) without even autofocus. It would be nice if someone could try it with an iPhone to see if it fares better.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#35

Post by jonursenbach » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 1:56 AM UTC

A friend of my girlfriend is part of the team that made this and he gave me a demo of this 5 or 6 months ago and even back then when it was in an early alpha form I was absolutely blown away by this thing.

Seeing this thing in action in real life is life changing.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#36

Post by bigmac » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 1:59 AM UTC

So, predictions on how long until Google buys these guys? I'd guess within the next 7 days.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#37

Post by solutionyogi » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 1:59 AM UTC

Wow. Just Wow.

I had to put the App to test.

Printed some simple English words and tried it out.

Original paper:

http://imgur.com/EYsko

What the App shows in REALTIME:

http://imgur.com/FhaSW

Comparison with Google Translate:

http://imgur.com/GOd94.jpg

[EDIT: Note, Translating Muerto Fin to English in Google Translate, does result in 'Dead End'. Can any Spanish reader clarify why the original Google Translate chose to translate 'DEAD END' to 'callejón sin sali'.]

[EDIT: So let me get this straight. Their program, running on iPhone [256MB RAM, 600 MHz ARM CPU], can take a live image, perform OCR, translate, create another image with the translated words. And all of this happens real time? Wow.]

I think it's really hard to get a 'Wow' reaction from HN crowd. And you have hit a home run! As someone else said in this thread, you are going to make boatload of money. Congrats!

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#38

Post by jonursenbach » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 2:01 AM UTC

johndeweese wrote: post #14

(hola, i'm john deweese, one of the creators) good to hear the early positive response, and we look forward to your insightful feedback (support@questvisual.com) -- mention this site so we pay some extra attention. i hope this app will be nice and disruptive, and we'll be looking carefully at what people expect and how they actually use it. it's a platform, and we're really excited about the directions it opens up. t…

Glad to see this finally out there in the wild and to have demoed it a while back at my house. Grats!

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#39

Post by frisco » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 2:01 AM UTC

These guys are going to have some hard decisions to make in the next few months. This has such incredible potential I'd be really sad to see it get bought and languish as a side-feature at Google. Run as a business, rather than a free technology project liable to be side-lined on whatever whim, and really developed for the next 5 years, think about what it could be! I mean, just look at what it is today on day one!

The offers will come, that much is certain; I can only hope they decide to go for it and turn this into something great.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#40

Post by rabble » Fri, Dec 17, 2010, 2:01 AM UTC

Totally awesome, but there's a big problem. Most of the time when you're in need of translation of text you find like signs, it's because you're in another country. That means data is very expensive, because your fancy iphone is locked and roaming.

It's awesome, many people may download it, but it will get very little use. :-\ They should probably charge like $5 or $10 for it, make money on people WANTING to use it, not on them actually using it.

Unless i'm mistaken and it's doing the image processing all locally, in that case, they've got a smash hit.