Imagine you’re traveling in a country whose language you don’t speak. You look up at a sign — say, a caution marker, or a list of directions. Oh, also, you’re wearing Google Glass. You say, “Okay Glass, translate this.” The words on the sign transform into your home language, so when you look through Glass, you can read them.
That’s what the new Word Lens app for Google Glass does, and it’s kind of magical. Blobs of translated text appear on the wearer’s screen with perspective intact, the same background color, and a matched font. It looks as though the sign has been reprinted in your own language.
The Word Lens Glass app works in real time, and it also accesses local storage. A dictionary of about 10,000 words in each chosen language are stored locally on the device, so users can get their translations even when they travel internationally without a data plan. That’s in contrast to Google’s own Google Goggles app, which requires a Web connection.
The app was built with the new Glass Developer Kit, which was released as a sneak peek to developers today at a hackathon in San Francisco. Word Lens got early access along with four other apps: Allthecooks (hands-free recipes), Strava (it’s the first time the activity-tracking company has given live progress reports about how well its runners and cyclists are doing, out of concern that using a phone or headphones would be unsafe), Spellista by GLU (the first Glass game) and GolfSight by SkyDroid (it’s for golf).
The GDK is supposed to be a major improvement on the original Glass Mirror API, which mostly helped with notifications and sharing. By contrast, the new tools give developers access to hardware (camera, GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, gestures) as well as offline and real-time capabilities.
More than 10,000 people have Glass today, a Google spokesman said. That’s not a big audience for an app developer. But developers at the event, including the Word Lens team, said they were appreciative that building for Glass with GDK is almost entirely the same as building for Android. They said they essentially ported over their Android apps and changed the user interface to be much, much simpler.
Google glass is developing a new technique, which translates the unknown words into a way that you will be able to understood. However, being able to understand possibly means you are able to know the literal meaning . Sometimes it is translated roughly, you can hardly understand in a deeper way. People are getting lazy with those new devices appear recent years, when we only rely on machine, think about it what can we do without those devices.You ought to learn and to be challenged with our brains. Google glass can bring lots of advantages to us, but this leads to another problem. It let people behave badly such as, look at other people’s test paper while you have their google glass on and it becomes a cheating behavior. Indeed, new device brings easy access to people, but can cause bad habits and behaviors.
In response to concerns over translations being incorrect, I think Google would probably figure out a way to make basic things like street signs and food/grocery items translate accurately. Google’s current translation technology is often a little off, and I wouldn’t read a book using Google Glass translations, but I think it would add value to an experience traveling if you could at least read signs and order food at a restaurant. I wonder, however, if this would start to take away from immersing yourself in another country’s culture if you did not have to anymore. In general, I think the GDK is a really good idea. As the current market suggests, not many people are buying Google Glass. Personally, I think the design of the glasses is rather unfashionable, but I could imagine Google improving on this in the future so that more people would want to buy and wear their glasses, especially because their entire interface is hands-free. It would be amazing to be able to track my fitness and activity levels all day, and having an activity monitor in sight would definitely remind me to go work out! In addition, if someone with a serious health problem wanted to monitor their heart rate or other vitals, the glasses would be beneficial to them because it would monitor vitals right in front of their eyes. I use my iPhone every day, but there are many apps that I would stop using on my phone if I could just use them via the glasses, and this would add value to my everyday life.
Google glass, which is a technology with an optical head-mounted display, came out in 2014. This new invention was boomed around the world because of numerous advantages. According to article about it, it shows text messages such as email and it allows us to reply them with voice commands. In succession, the Google glass improves and adds some options as well as translating other languages. While reading your article, it sounds really fabulous that Google glass can translate any language you are traveling. Therefore, you do not need to worry about language barrier, and you will be safe from molester while traveling. However, there are some disadvantages about this technology.
According to my research, Google glass still has some disadvantages, which should be reformed. First of all, this translation system does not operate perfectly. As an international student in the United State, I usually use Google translation. However, the translation system does not work well. The grammar function is totally incorrect so that I cannot even understand my mother language. Google glass still have some issues. For example, it cannot used by people who have some issue with their eyes. It also has sensitive device so that it is easily broken. For me, these two things are the biggest disadvantages.
In conclusion, Google glass should have some improvement and reform in order to overcome challenges from language barriers.
I read your article, but unfortunately, I don’t agree with you not only google glass translation, but also the entire technology of translation. From the introduction of translation with technology, over several decade years, there are many advanced technology of translation. However, still translation technology is not perfect. Still, translating with other language, sentences are not correct, and usually technology does not right translation confusing with homophone, or translating without considering the context. As a result, although advanced technology, we cannot understand when we read translated sentences.
I agree with the advance of google glasses. It will be very useful to use and in near future, it will be one of most important and common devices, but I think translation technology needs time to develop more.
I don’t need to worry about the words that I don’t understand anymore if I have this classes. Sounds incredible lol. People can read newspaper in other languages, people can know the name of the dish while having launch in restaurants. Even though the technology isn’t adapted into other applications, I am sure it will make some positive effects on the future.