Introducing Word Lens
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN brings it up as an early, impressive augmented-reality translation demo and a wow moment before modern AI.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2012 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Cites joezydeco · 2012-02 · on “Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End”
"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.
Cites otaviogood · 2014-12 · on “Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?”
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 smal
Cites amelius · 2017-11 · on “WhatTheFont – Shazam for Fonts”
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]
Cites ben_w · 2026-06 · on “What was your "Oh Shit" moment with GenAI?”
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 s