Word Lens is a new augmented reality app for the iPhone which has the potential to become the traveller’s best friend.
It’s one slick looking app the makers describe as “like Google Goggles meets Google Translate… in Photoshop!”
Basically, the user captures a sign in a foreign language on the iPhone‘s camera, and the app recognises the text, then translates it on-the-fly into English, pasting the result over the foreign words on the display.
No connection to the Internet is necessary, either, just the app on your handset. By all accounts and judging from demo videos, the translation is pretty speedy, near instant in fact.
The one drawback is that currently, only Spanish to English is available (or English to Spanish) priced at $4.99, although support for more languages is planned. There’s currently a 50% off launch sale, which lasts until the end of the year.
You can also grab a free version of the app, which merely reverses any words in the image just to show you how the technology works.