Quest Visual, Inc. was an American
private company that developed
Word Lens, an
augmented reality
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be de ...
translation application.
In May 2014, the company was acquired by
Google, Inc.
Company
Quest Visual was founded by a former video game developer
Otavio Good in 2009.
At the time of acquisition the company had 4 full-time employees (Good, John DeWeese, Bryan Lin, and Eric Park,) and a contractor, Maia Good.
The details of the acquisition have not been released.
Products
Quest Visual's first product, Word Lens 1.0, was released on December 16, 2010,
and was available in 2015 as Word Lens 2.2.3 for
Apple's
iPhone,
iPod
The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about months after the Macintosh version of iTunes ...
, and
iPad through
iTunes
iTunes () is a software program that acts as a media player, media library, mobile device management utility, and the client app for the iTunes Store. Developed by Apple Inc., it is used to purchase, play, download, and organize digital mul ...
,
as well as for a selection of
Android
Android may refer to:
Science and technology
* Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human
* Android (operating system), Google's mobile operating system
** Bugdroid, a Google mascot sometimes referred to ...
smartphones through
Google Play.
It was unavailable as of 2021.
At
Google's unveiling of its Glass Development Kit in November 2013, translation capabilities of Word Lens were also demonstrated on
Google Glass.
According to a January 2014
''New York Times'' article, Word Lens is currently free for Google Glass.
Google also made all Word Lens language packs freely available for a "limited time".
Word Lens capabilities were incorporated into the
Google Translate app and released on January 14, 2015.
The company did not have any other products by the time of acquisition.
See also
*
Augmented reality
Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be de ...
*
Optical character recognition
*
Google Translate
References
{{reflist, 2
External links
Quest Visualhomepage
* Word Len
on iTunesOriginal video demonstrationof Word Lens
* Otavio Goo
explainsWord Lens 1.0.1 (interview with
Reuters)
Companies based in San Francisco
Defunct software companies of the United States
Google acquisitions
2009 establishments in California
Software companies established in 2009
2015 disestablishments in California
Software companies disestablished in 2015
2015 mergers and acquisitions