5.5M views · Dec 16, 2010 · 1:10 · 0 HN recommenders · 4 mentions · discussed 2012–2026
A one-minute demo of Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates printed text in real time by overlaying the translation on the camera view. It was later folded into Google Translate.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN brings it up as an early, impressive augmented-reality translation demo and a wow moment before modern AI.
“2010, seeing the demo video of Word Lens”HN comment, 2026
“Word Lens seems to be doing it just fine on an iPhone”
Word Lens does real-time translation overlays on an iPhone
"Real-time overlays are still impractical, right?" Word Lens seems to be doing it just fine on an iPhone: this video Seriously, foreign language translation would be a natural for a product like this.
Don't be afraid to drop a project. I tend to have a handful of projects going at any one time. A good project will stand out and it will pull you through to completion. Pretty much all of my significant jobs were spun out of my side projects. My current job started as a side project that I prototyped in a few weeks. A company was built around it and now our company is part of Google. This. this video Take note of things that inspire you. For me, books or other people's projects. Show your work to your friends and try to convince your friends to work on projects with you. Find programming languages / environments that make it easy to spin up a simple project without too much overhead. Start small. Last I counted, I have about 140 folders in my dev directory. Each one has a small project I started up. One turned into a successful company. Another won a DARPA challenge. A few others were released in various forms. But most got dropped because they just weren't as cool as something else. And I think dropping projects isn't just ok, it's great fun and will help you find that project that's worth completing.
“it will identify the font, translate the sign to a different language, and edit the image with the translated text.”
App translating signs in real time with edited image
If you want to take it a step further: there's an app ([1]) that allows you to aim your smartphone camera at a sign, and it will identify the font, translate the sign to a different language, and edit the image with the translated text. All in real time. [1] this video
“2010, seeing the demo video of Word Lens”
Word Lens demo as an early wow moment
I had a lot of such moments, including: • Most recent, I had the option of either buying an app from the app store to train myself on the piano, or vibe coding a web app to connect with an attached MIDI keyboard and accept an uploaded MIDI file and give me an experience like Guitar Hero, and Claude did this in two prompts of their free (not subscription) version, where the second prompt was just the word "continue". • First demo of InstructGPT (predecessor to ChatGPT), because I remember how much worse the state of the art in NLP had been, and because I hadn't expected instruction following from the quality of continuation seen in GPT-3.x • 2019, "This Person Does Not Exist" • 2016, seeing style transfer and similar working ( link ) and what would now be called Deep Fakes (back when Two Minute Papers videos were <2 minutes long: link ) • 2015, when I (in retrospect, foolishly) believed Tesla about their over-the-air software update that introduced self-driving: link • 2013, word2vec, "man" - "woman" ~= "king" - "queen", again because of knowing how bad the state of the art in NLP has been (If you're wondering why "uh oh" from that, consider value in automating propaganda, and surveillance opportunities for automating comprehension of slang/cants like Polari). • 2010, seeing the demo video of Word Lens: this video
