Do you understand?

Augmented reality, although in its beginning stages, is fascinating to most of its users. It has so much potential to make the world around us easier to navigate and to understand. It could help us understand the world around us in a completely different way, in a way that we have never seen before, while breaking the barriers of communication between people across the world.

Language is one of the greatest barriers that holds back people from communicating, sharing ideas, and learning new things. Many people may even be discouraged from visiting new and different places fearing that the language barrier may cause them to not have the best experience that they could hope for. And one solution to this is augmented reality.

With the help of augmented reality, we could translate text in the world around us almost instantaneously with the help of a seeing capable device (today we use our phone cameras). Today, there is an application that is working on the translation of different languages simply by pointing a camera at it or by uploading an image and that is Google’s translate app. It uses augmented reality to overlay translated text over the existing text to be translated when used in instant mode and uses word detection and translates the text normally when uploading a picture.

After testing the app with different languages I can say that we are a good ways away from perfecting this technology and it needs a lot of work but it has a lot of potential for greatness. Sometimes the app would detect and translate correctly and other times it was very wrong. But all in all I believe that this could be very effectively used in many ways. When traveling, one could navigate the streets of a foreign city more easily or when wanting to read a piece of literature or a letter in a foreign language it would be much quicker and easier to decipher. This could even be used in a classroom setting to help a student understand the language that they are learning.

But the question is, if this information is simply displayed in front of us will it discourage us from learning different languages and lead to us having a lazy mindset where we don’t want to seek anymore knowledge because it is all readily available to us in a way that needs minimal effort to consume? Considering that in the future we might be viewing the world through glasses that would have this translational ability, it would be crucial for the user to have an option of turning it on or off and being able to choose which information is translated and which is not. There is a possibility that the ability to choose could minimize the negative effect that this technology could have as a user might choose to translate everything around them from a familiar language to a foreign one to learn it. At the end of the day it is difficult to predict what the future will hold. It all comes down to which path the consumer decides to take.