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"The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles \u2014 it delivers smart mobility services. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.\nThe iOS application Word Lens, as its creator Otavio Good describes it, is just a dictionary with a good interface. \"What's new is the good interface,\" he says \u2014 the interface being your mobile device. \nBut when the \"interface\" in question includes sophisticated vector and graphics processing (as on newer versions of the iPhone), Word Lens is more like a personal translator than a dictionary. \nSimply point your camera at text to see the translated words appear on your device's screen in real-time, no Internet connection required.\nThis magic-like text translation effect could change the way the world travels. It can help tourists decipher signs, menus and brochures, avoid uncomfortable situations, better understand their surroundings and ultimately get them to feel more at home in a far away place. \nGood says he hopes \"it will help you learn a language a lot more naturally \u2026 in that environment.\" It's more natural, he says, because the user can see word-for-word meanings and get a better grasp on sentence structure.\nFor now, Word Lens [iTunes link] sells just two language packs: Spanish to English translation and English to Spanish translation, each pack costing $9.99.\nMashable spoke with Good to better understand how Word Lens goes about translating text in video.\nA Good Idea\n\n\n\n\n\"My mom taught me to program computer graphics when I was about seven years old,\" Good recalls. \"I've been programming ever since then.\"\nIn 2000, Good was one of three guys to found Secret Level, a video game startup that grew to more than 50 employees before it was acquired by SEGA for $15 million in 2006. Good stayed with SEGA for the next two and a half years, a condition of the deal.\nDuring his time at SEGA, Good traveled to Germany, where he came up with the idea for the Word Lens. \"I didn't take it very seriously at first,\" he says. \nHis coworkers encouraged him to follow through with the idea, and Good had a working prototype running in three weeks time. \"I didn't know for another two years that I could pull it off,\" he says. \nIn the interim, the prototype and the potential opportunity to create an instant translator for the lucrative tourism market was enough to convince him to see the idea come to fruition.\nIn December 2010, roughly two and a half years after the first prototype was built, Word Lens launched for iPhone. \nQuest Visual, the startup behind Word Lens, is now three employees: Good, John DeWeese and Good's mom, Maia Good. It's entirely bootstrapped and has enough funds flowing in through in-app purchases to fund development.\nAbout That Video\n\n\n\n\nWord Lens' launch was heralded by a YouTube video that plays like a magic trick. The video, created by Good's brother, a video production teacher, became an instant viral sensation and helped Word Lens draw an onslaught of media and consumer attention.\n\"It makes the program look a little too good,\" Good admits. \"But my brother put so much effort into it and it looked so good \u2026 that I decided to put it out there.\"\nThe video sparked immediate interest, both good and bad. While the press lauded the application as the future of language translation, some users who downloaded it were met with disappointment when they discovered its shortcomings. \nWord Lens translations are not perfect, and the application works best with clear text and bright light, meaning any other circumstances will yield less favorable results. Handwriting and unusual fonts will trip the application up, for instance.\nThe startup is admittedly limited by hardware that's not quite ready to perform Word Lens' instant translation magic trick in exactly way the video promises with every use. The video may gloss over Word Lens' imperfections, but \"it is very much real; there's no faking,\" Good says.\nHow Word Lens Works\n\n\n\n\nPoint your iPhone or iPad 2 camera lens at text using Word Lens and the application takes an image from the video and detects where the text is, Good explains. The application then reads the letters in the text and puts the letters into words and sentences in order to perform translations.\nGood's description simplifies the technology and the two-plus years that went into the application's development.\nWhat took so long for the app to be released? Good speaks of a number of technological challenges, but specifically calls out phone processing limitations.\n\"If you want more quality, you have to take more processing power. When I first started working on it, the phones that were out were not capable \u2026 I had to squeeze every little bit of processing out of these phones.\"\nGood also speaks to challenges associated with translation. \"There are three hard problems rolled up into one,\" Good says of what goes into the app's complex translation process.\nFirst is OCR, or optical character recognition, Word Len's ability to recognize characters in video images. Second is design. Word Lens is faced with the challenge of looking at and deciphering heavily stylized and branded text. Machine translation is the third challenge because the technology is not yet a perfect science.\nWhat's Next for Word Lens\n\n\n\n\nWord Lens, which had its biggest spike at launch, continues to perform well on the Apple App Store thanks to ongoing press. \nEllen DeGeneres recently featured the app on her daytime television show (as seen above), which caused a huge spike in downloads. The application also has Apple's support \u2014 it's been featured on the App Store and included in UK and Spain iPhone ad spots.\nStill, the application is attracting many who are fascinated by the idea, but who are not using it for its actual purpose. That was partly intentional, Good indicates. \n\"When we released this, I wanted to get it in the hands of early adopters,\" he says, \"because early adopters are very forgiving. But, it got a little bigger than early adopters.\"\nNow, Word Lens is tasked with satisfying a less forgiving crowd. Plus, those seriously interested in employing Word Lens translation abilities may need to wait awhile for additional languages and apps on other platforms. \nAdding new languages is quite complicated, Good says. The initial program and its OCR library was written from scratch to read Latin characters. Reading more complex characters, Japanese or Korean for instance, will require even more work, though the startup is looking to hire new talent to speed up the process.\n\"We'll tackle languages in order of difficulty, combined with how many people want [each language],\" Good says. First up is French.\nThe startup does plan to release applications for other mobile operating systems such as Android, but has no concrete dates to announce at this time. \nGood promises that the application's quality will get a lot better \u2014 and soon. He expects mobile device hardware will finally catch up to his translation technology and predicts that the iPhone 5 will have the processing power and camera quality he needs to make Word Lens the language barrier-breaking app it is intended to be.\nSeries Supported by BMW i\n\n\n\n\nThe Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.Are you an innovative entrepreneur? Submit your pitch to BMW i Ventures, a mobility and tech venture capital company.\n\nImage courtesy of Flickr, Christian Niles"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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