Pokemon Go

Have you heard of Pokemon Go? To date, it has been one of the most successful mobile apps and has exposed SO MANY people to a very basic form of Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality, by definition, is the ability to impose virtual elements onto the real world, generally in a way that appears believable. Note that in the strictest sense of the definition does NOT require any kind of headset.

In Pokemon Go, a 3D Model of a Pokemon is rendered on top of the image you get from your camera. To create the illusion that the Pokemon is in your world, the phone tracks the rotation of your phone and makes the Pokemon visible for a given rotation of your phone.

Fun Fact, Pokemon Go uses the Google Cardboard SDK to track the rotation of your phone.

But Pokemon Go just touches the surface of what AR is capable of and there is a lot of Computer Vision work that needs to be done in order to make AR applications performant and reliable.

That said, several companies are making amazing strides forward towards realistic AR. For this quiz, we want you to try out Google Translate, specifically its camera translate feature. You can download the app on both Android and iOS and it has some pretty cool features. But, it isn’t always perfect. See if you can find an example where you are able to break it and try to figure out why the task might have been too complicated.

Standard Google Image Search for Spanish Road Signs

Translated Result