[johndeweese]

(hola, i'm john deweese, one of the creators) good to hear the early positive response, and we look forward to your insightful feedback ([e-mail]) -- 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.

thanks for the link, cheers!

[revorad]

Please, do NOT sell this to Yahoo.

Or anyone for that matter. Make a business, be king of the world. You deserve it.

[kmfrk]

You should register wordlensapp.com or something of the like. I'm not sure hosting nothing but the app promotion on a site with a completely different URL is beneficial.

With such a product, you should perhaps brand yourself more on your product than your company name. :)

Just throwing it out there.

[staunch]

For future reference: never mention registering a domain in a public forum. Some douchebag will always register it and try to sell it to you.

In this case someone has already registered wordlensapp.com. We can only hope it's the Quest Visual people.

[kmfrk]

I thought better of HN. Shame.

There are many trends for using domains similar to what you would desire: get<product> being the best, and <product>app being one of the other choices.

I have very bad experiences with finding an app's site, if it models <product>app. Maybe it's just bad SEO on their part, but I imagine that it'd be an awful hassle for any normal user who don't know the conventions.

Then it struck me that <use>product would be a very interesting domain that makes much more sense than <product>app. It also mirrors the imperative <get>, although it may not be as popular and known to users - yet.

I think it's a shame they didn't secure a regular <product>.com domain for such a great product - but, on the other hand, I'm sure all the press will forgive them (hell, they're trending on Twitter, and 80% of my social media digest today was about the bloody thing).

I've registered usewordlens.com, usewordlens.net, and usewordlens.org and will be happy to hand it over or point it to a domain of their choice (if someone tells me how the hell to do it using name.com, because I'm a complete idiot in that regard. I guess I have to mess with some DNS).

[elliottcarlson]

Doesn't look like it...

Different registrar, different DNS and the obvious spam landing page. sigh

[pchristensen]

Since you mentioned this, I registered wordlens.co and set it to redirect to their website. I emailed the info and asked them if they want it. That's how awesome I think this app is - I'd rather spend my own money to make sure they get a good domain.

otaviogood or johndeweese, if you're reading this, my email is in my profile.

[blhack]

This is why we can have nice things, HN. Good on ya.

[macrael]

Definitely put up a non-flash version of your promo video on your website; your target audience won't be able to watch it, as is!

[bootload]

"... Definitely put up a non-flash version of your promo video on your website ..."

Agree I can't read it, pretty simple request.

[Raphael]

iOS can't play YouTube videos?

[stevelosh]

I just went to the site, tapped the video, and watched it on my iPhone. OP has clearly not tried this.

[Sephr]

Do you plan on creating an Android version anytime soon?

[mey]

An android or SDK version that could be used with a heads up display system would be impressive. If you can do more then Spanish, you should consider talking to the US Military.

[GeneralMaximus]

For the love of FSM, do it! I speak for a vast majority of Android users here on HN when I say I'd buy this even if it cost five times what it does now.

[jamii]

Absolutely. Android is really popular in Korea, a Korean-English pack would make a killing with all the english students and expats.

[tassl]

From the technological point of view I can just say wow! Congratulations, this is a great app.

Aside from that, and as a Spanish native speaker, the translated text sounds really weird to me. Even without knowing English I would be able to understand the translated text (at least the example that you gave) but it can be improved. But this is the only con that I see to your application. Probably you're already working on that, but I thought that you might like this input.

Great idea!!

[middlegeek]

Please port it to the Android platform!

[nathanlrivera]

1. The logo seems similar to the United Nations logo. What was your inspiration for the logo? 2. In the video, who is holding the camera? And who is holding the signs? 3. Did you use an ad agency to make the video, or did you put it together yourselves?

The first card says "welcome to the future" which I thought was perfect :)

[otaviogood]

The designer who made the logo said he was going for a passport look. My brother made the video. He also did the music in the video. He's pretty good with that stuff.

[DanielN]

Have you guy's explored at all how difficult mandarin translations will be? If it is possible this would be a huge market for you.

[darren_]

Depending on how their OCR works, Mandarin/Japanese->English(/spanish/&c) could be a _lot_ more difficult (thousands of characters to distinguish) and in the case of Japanese the translation a lot trickier (completely different grammar, Mandarin's not so bad though).

This could just be a case of needing to optimize and train their recognizer to deal with a much larger set of possible characters, or it could require implementing kanji-specific OCR techniques like attempting to decompose the characters into their constituent strokes, and recognize based on classification of those strokes (orientation, position, direction).

[anonymoushn]

I would have absolutely no problem reading Japanese or Chinese if it just did a word-for-word translation, romanized all the particles, and expected me to know what they meant (or had a handy feature that explained them when the image was paused). Even so far from actual translation, this would still pass for one of the best things ever.

Of course, guessing the correct word when performing word-for-word translation of hanzi is almost impossible, so even the extremely primitive product I'm thinking of is very difficult.

[DanielN]

This is what I was thinking. I don't know about Japanese, but sentence structure in mandarin is pretty much reversed from what it is in romance languages. And so much of character meaning is based on context that outside of common phrases it might be nearly impossible.

On the other hand, an English to Chinese translator might be more doable, and might also be more commercially profitable.

[masterj]

Even an app that converted characters into the most direct meaning could provide insight in a large number of cases into the intended meaning and would be valuable.

An app that converted from characters to pinyin (a much easier problem) would be gold to someone trying to learn mandarin. I'd easily pay $50 for something with that functionality without it even making an attempt at the english. It's a much smaller market than those trying to understand chinese signs on a vacation, but it's one with a much larger stake and interest in the result.

[aperiodic]

The Chinese dictionary app Pleco has an OCR plugin.

Here's a video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc

[elblanco]

spot on! I can usually muddle through Spanish and French signs when I travel, but I'm terrified of traveling to China or Japan where the signs are quite a bit more impenetrable.

[scg]

How long was this app in development?

[tortilla]

TechCrunch article says 2 1/2 years.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/world-lens-translates-words...

[chime]

You guys have made Doctor Who's Tardis translation-in-the-brain come one step closer to being real. I just tried it and it works perfectly. In my minimal experience, it works great on medium sized text so you may want to advice users to get closer/further from the text if your app can't find anything to translate (i.e. OCR fails).

[darren_]

As a language learner I'd love the ability to capture and export (in some fashion) the pre-translated text, as text not an image, to import into SRS learning software. This especially applies to the Japanese/Mandarin support that I hope you guys are working on.

[jonursenbach]

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

[random42]

Awesome stuff. I assume you guys have the patent on this technology, if not, please get it ASAP.

[iskander]

Have you guys yet tried adding grammar models to the translator? Can a full-language bigram model run in real time?