Tag: Ocr

A couple of years ago we checked out OpenGlass, a prototype software that used Google Glass to help the visually impaired identify objects. OrCam has a very similar function. It has a camera that clips on to eyeglasses and recognizes text, faces and objects.

Most mobile devices already have a built-in calculator, and you can also get advanced calculator apps. But microBLINK’s PhotoMath app uses optical image recognition on printed equations, so that you can get the solution without even having to input a number.

Braille helps visually impaired people read, but there is a lot of printed material that is never converted to that writing system. Blind people also miss out on using mobile devices because obviously they can’t feel the text on screen.

We’ve seen an iOS app that can translate text from one language to another in real-time. The engineers at Japanese telecommunications company NTT DoCoMo thought it would be easier for users if the translator was integrated into a pair of glasses.

The computer mouse has received quite a lot of attention in the past few months. From mice with digital photo frames to ones with a digital weighing scale, I thought I’ve seen my fair share of multi-purpose mice, at least for this year.

Mobile Internet is great – you can check your email, read the news, reserve seats at restaurants, and even check for parking spots, all from your smartphone. Not that I enjoy any of that fantastic futuristic stuff here where I live, but it’s nice to know that theoretically, I could.

Otavio Good and John DeWeese worked for two and a half years to produce a program that, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke’s famous line, is indistinguishable from magic. Good and DeWeese’s app Word Lens is a essentially an OCR (optical character recognition) program.