An App for Reading Japanese

The arrow is universal, and for everything else, there will soon be an app.

Image: Garth Helms / Shutterstock

Augmented reality applications are certainly no longer just for painting mustaches on your friends while they chat up a girl at the bar. And for a road warrior on a business trip, this app may have just made itself essential—no longer will business travelers be forced into the “point and hope” scenario when ordering food in a different language, and no longer will street routes need to be meticulously planned out in advance.

Japanese electronics company Omron has developed an app that uses a smartphone camera to instantly translate texts such as street signs and menu items written in English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, according to TechCrunch, and hopes to have the app preinstalled on smartphones this year.

The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) app applies what Omron calls “pattern vision” to superimpose translations over actual images so the user can order from the menu or decipher a street sign in real time, as if actually reading the menu or street sign. The app will be especially useful across different alphabets. After all, it’s easy to look up “agua” on Babel Fish, but try typing:

With the OCR app, the user simply holds the camera in front of the symbol and the word "water" floats in augmented reality above it.

Founded in 1933 by Kazuma Tateisi, Omron has worked in businesses as diverse as x-ray, development, curling irons, and counterfeit currency detection. In 2010, 45 percent of Omron’s $618 billion in net sales came from industrial automation, with only 13 percent coming from electronic and mechanical components such as the OCR application.