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Comment by jack-r-abbit | Hacker News Reader

WHOA! How freakin' cool would this be on Google Glasses when traveling abroad! Everywhere you look... the text is just translated for you.

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If it can do that, it will be pretty easy to make it appear to "take the clothes off" people. (Note, I'm very much not saying this should be done, just that it will be done.) They say that to calm your nerves when public speaking, you should visualize your audience in their underwear. Will be psychologically interesting, at least, to see how that works out for the first Glasses-wearing presenter to try it. Strange world we live in.

I'm failing to see how you've made that jump? How does recognizing words, translating them and displaying the result compare to mapping a naked body from only uncovered skin? at best, you could get the correct skin tone on a model.

Oh certainly it wouldn't be an accurate representation, it'd have to just "guess" with a generic model transformed to closely match the position/shape/skin tone of the person. Anyway, didn't mean to get off topic (or sound horribly creepy!), it's just that there are a million "interesting" (in good or bad ways) apps that people will be playing with once they have these powerful, programmable devices that can filter/overlay their view of the world in real time. It will be a fundamental change in the way people interact with the world — whether you're wearing them or not, if this catches on, many of the people around you will be. Right now we all have a pretty good idea of what other people are seeing — in most cases its roughly what we're seeing, just from a different location; in the not too distant future, that may not be so.

Staying off topic for a just a bit more, one obvious example would be to automatically give everyone you see a moustache. An app was on Hacker News that does this within the past month. People interested in developing these filters can start building them now by creating smart phone apps and then port them over once Glasses becomes available.

Forget about LCD/LED displays. This is more like an LSD display. You could have all sorts of weird/random stuff overlayed so you're always walking around like you're trippin' balls.

What people seem to be forgetting is that Glass isn't augemented reality -- it's a display that sits in the top of your vision, not over all of it.

... not yet anyway.

Indeed, and it already seemed like this was definitely on their to-do list from the Glass keynote. I don't know how you could build a product like Glass and /not/ do that (other than it perhaps being an extremely difficult problem ;P).

More than that, microphone + reasonable speech recognition = everybody you talk to is instantly subtitled. Also an extremely difficult problem, but one I'll bet will be commonplace in 15 years.

Mind blown! Having everyone subtitled would be way cool for traveling abroad. But even more so for the hearing impaired.

I take it that you are not familiar with the way the German language order words?

Because there is no way you could accurately subtitle German in English, other than knowing what he is going to say before he say it.

Or just show the subtitles after a short delay. Or show a word-by-word translation in realtime. Or both.

Pfft. Just use the mind reader api. It works based on words already said, body language, and tone.

> there is no way you could accurately subtitle German in English

At one time I am sure there were people that said, "Mr. Wright, there is no way you can get that thing to fly."

A piece of unsolicited advice:

Learn the difference between what cannot be done and what is impossible.

I conveyed this to the developers[1] a few months ago, this would be a great acquisition for the Google Glass project.

[1]https://twitter.com/inkaudio/status/195677653049683969

An acquisition would only make sense if they had relevant patents to purchase, which they do not.

Not always. While it is highly likely that Google could hire (or already has) the talent to build the same thing, acquiring a finished product and the talent that built it can be cheaper and faster than DIY. But yes, having a patent would make a deal even sweeter.

Don't underestimate the amount of work, expertise and experience required to arrive at word lens, to date I've to yet to see this technology duplicated elsewhere. Google has acquire hire before recently with milk inc, I don't see why they can't with this team.

This. Wordlens is computationally intensive and required a significant amount of GPU knowledge to get working in the first place, and then a couple revs of the iPhone before the hardware caught up. Otavio has some serious graphics chops that made the product possible.

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