Quest Visual, Inc. was an American private company that developed Word Lens, an augmented reality 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, and iPad through iTunes, as well as for a selection of Android 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
Optical character recognition
Google Translate
References
External links
Quest Visual homepage
Word Lens on iTunes
Original video demonstration of Word Lens
Otavio Good explains Word Lens 1.0.1 (interview with Reuters)