Homework 3

Mark Chen, mchen200

CS 428 - Homework 3

Prompt: Right now on your smartphone, it allows you to have a lens that you can move over the real world and see it modified on the phone's screen, but what if you were running this in a future AR pair of glasses or contact lenses, and it was automatically translating everything it sees to the language of your choice and hiding the original text from the real world. What are the pros and cons of that? How much control do you think the user should have over the way the synthetic is mapped over the real.

I think having AR pair of glasses that can translate foreign languages would be really cool and beneficial to society. One benefit is that a person using the AR glasses wouldn’t have to spend years and years of studying a foreign language to read foreign texts. Some examples would include restaurants that have menus written in their language. Not all restaurants have pictures or english translations of their foods, especially if the restaurant you’re going to is outside of the United States. Another benefit is making travel easier and funner. Whether you’re at the airport looking for your gate, at the mall looking for a bathroom, shopping and trying to understand what you’re buying, or understanding that a sign says, “Restricted Area. Do not Enter” and getting arrested for trespassing. Having AR glasses to translate would make travelling in foreign countries better, and safer.

Some cons to having AR glasses is that it devalues learning foreign languages. If everything is translated for you, then there would be less of a need to have foreign languages as a requirement for schools, and less people wanting to learn a new language in general. Another con would be if the AR glasses would be censorship. Some areas of the world such as China have censorship from searching up specific things like the Tiananmen Square Massacre and social media. Maybe there could be a propaganda sign in a different language talking about something censored, and the AR glasses translate it. If you’re caught with that, then you would probably go through some serious consequences from the government.

I think users should be able to control maybe 25% of what is synthesized in their vision, so it isn’t entirely distracting. The user should be able to control when to turn on and off the device without any lag. It should practically be instantaneous. In the case of translating something illegal in a country, I think the user should have the option to risk translating illegal things.