Finding your way around a foreign country and buying food at the shops can be a nightmare. Ismail Haritaoglu at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, decided to do something about it. He linked a palmtop computer to a digital camera and a mobile phone and took pictures of Chinese labels next to food in a Chinese grocery. The palmtop sent the images over the phone to a server which used software to read the Chinese characters and translate them into English. It beamed back the translated words within 10 seconds, and Haritaoglu’s palmtop then superimposed them over…
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