Macenstein

Every once in awhile an iPhone app comes along that is so game-changing, so utterly genius, and so utter useless to me personally that I still feel compelled to get it anyway, just to impress people who don’t already own an iPhone. Word Lens is just such an app.

Two things should be immediately apparent from the screenshot above. The first, is that Word Lens uses “augmented reality” to automatically translate and replace any Spanish text into English (or Englsh to Spanish), on the fly, no internet connection required, simply by pointing your iPhone’s camera at it. The second is that I will never use this for its intended purposes. (Oh, and I guess the third thing is that I’m ridiculously immature).

As you might be able to tell, Word Lens does a straight word-for word translation, so grammar will suffer a bit, but it’s still pretty awesome. But what I found really impressive about about Word Lens is that it actually even works on handwritten words as well.

Here’s a video demo of the app working slightly smoother than it does in real life. A case of optimum conditions gives optimum results and such. Still, it DOES work pretty flawlessly.

If you’re looking for something to talk about at this year’s holiday gathering, and you plan to have any Spanish printed text lying around said gathering, then Word Lens is a must-have app. Oh, and I suppose you could use it to actually translate text as you travel or something, but who would do that?

The App is free, and will simply reverse onscreen text in demo mode. Each language pack sets you back $4.99.