Augmented Reality App for Translating Chinese Characters [2002]

Now, Dr. Haritaoglu has come up with a wireless solution to these translation blues: a cellphone or palmtop containing a color digital camera that takes a snapshot of the mysterious text and sends it along to a server. Software on the server identifies and translates the text, sends the English words back, and superimposes them on the screen.

So Dr. Haritaoglu can point and click with his hand-held device at a sign in a grocery store window containing the Chinese characters for ginseng, shark fin and herbs, as he did recently in San Francisco's Chinatown, and, 10 or 15 seconds later, see the words in English on the screen.