Word Lens’ futuristic translations has us speechless

This is easily the coolest thing we’ve seen in a long time.

Word Lens has officially blown our minds, thanks its amazing, scifi-like core function — to instantly translate whatever you point your iPhone camera at.

It must use some type of OCR (optical character recognition) technology to “read” the text and then search for a translation. But what isn’t clear is how in the world it manages to offer the translations in such an unbelievable way.

There’s no lame ASCII text output on the screen — the visuals take a detour into awesome town by positioning the translation right into the item you’re looking at, in almost real time!

This sort of reminds me of that classic movie, The Last Starfighter, when extraterrestrial beings would just slap on a doohickey over their necks that would translate their alien tongue into English. This is sort of like that, but in graphics. And without the aliens. Or starfighters…. Okay, it’s nothing like that, but it is one step closer to the future, I’m certain.

The app is free (you can grab it here), but bear in mind, if you want anything other than a demo, you’ll have to cough up $5 for the translations. (Right now, it’s just English to Spanish, or the other way around.) But who cares? That’s $5 well-spent if this app (1) gets support for a few more language packs and (2) works half as well as this incredible video.

Like the pic above says, welcome to the future.