The Glade 4.0

Ok... I know I already made an augmented reality post... but you guys have to watch this!

Make all the augmented reality posts you want; this **** is crazy!

This really drives home Moore's Law. They're doing this with a cell phone. Think about that. Maybe I overestimate the computational cost, but it seems like this sort of thing would have been a challenging task for a typical desktop not too long ago...

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

The computational cost really depends on how good your algorithm is. I have some decent OCR experience and can see how this is feasible. I'm mostly amazed at how well they optimized the algorithm to process this in real time.

By the way, it's definitely not fake... I found this link on Reddit.com and dozens of people commented how they downloaded it and it works exactly like in the video.

edit:

My guess is that once it identifies letters exist, it uses just a few frames initially to do OCR and the translating. That's the heavy processing (you can notice a half-second delay). After that it's a less costly matter of verifying the letters are the same and painting a new image over the old one, with translated text rotated correctly. I wonder how they do the fonts.

Ayup. My coworker just came in and showed this to me this morning.

Holyshit.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Just doing OCR is not terribly impressive, but the fact that they can do it at even several frames per second on tilted surfaces is pretty impressive.

I tried the demo version, which just reverses words or erases them (it's $5 for the translating apps), and while it's not quite as slick as what they show in the video, it does more or less work. Stylized fonts and surfaces that aren't very flat both confuse it pretty badly and you get a fair amount of "flickering" text. Oddly, it doesn't work at all with the camera turned horizontally, which is pretty annoying.

It's still pretty awesome, though.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I wish I had an iphone myself to test this. I have Verizon right now though, which doesn't support iphones.

My eventual plan is to get both an iphone and a new computer with a powerful GPU. I'll have the iphone stream video to the computer, which will process the video in some way and stream back new images for the iphone to display.

Huh, yet that's all the video showed, strange.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

You should check this out:

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/amds-next-gen-gpu-powers-crysis-on-an-iphone.ars

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

It looks like people stole my idea .

Seriously though, I can't wait for it to become standard for desktop computers to power iphones. It's sort of like cheating Moore's law.