VoxelTek
.
Hey!
So both me and a friend love Outer Wilds, and consider it one of the best games of all time, if not the best. Actually, if you haven't played it, stop whatever you're doing and go play it before even thinking of doing anything else. Besides, minor spoilers ahead, so...
Anyway, one of the key parts of the game is that a lot of the plot is discovered through text written on walls and such, and to understand it, you have a translation tool, made by the wonderful Hal of Timber Hearth.
I was browsing the internet, friend beside me, when we came across this neat project:
https://www.printables.com/model/113150-nomai-translator-outer-wilds
Naturally, we both thought it was pretty cool. However, I started thinking, what if you could make something like this, but actually functional?
I realised that a lot of technologies to do something like this already kinda exist. OCR, coupled with a translation API, can read whatever you're looking at and translate it. Add on a screen, and you've got something that could effectively do what this device does. For bonus points, you could add on a couple line lasers to mimic the "reading" the original tool does. I also realised I kinda have all the parts necessary for this just...laying around. A Pi Zero to act as the OCR and translation computer, a Pi camera to actually capture the text, and several white-on-blue character LCDs that I feel might match the style of the original screen rather nicely, are all things that I have, and are all effectively going unused at the moment.
With that, I decided I should start on making something like this. Not much has happened just yet, I'm mostly setting up things on the software side, but I do think this could be a pretty cool project, as well as being fairly simple (hopefully).
So both me and a friend love Outer Wilds, and consider it one of the best games of all time, if not the best. Actually, if you haven't played it, stop whatever you're doing and go play it before even thinking of doing anything else. Besides, minor spoilers ahead, so...
Anyway, one of the key parts of the game is that a lot of the plot is discovered through text written on walls and such, and to understand it, you have a translation tool, made by the wonderful Hal of Timber Hearth.
I was browsing the internet, friend beside me, when we came across this neat project:
https://www.printables.com/model/113150-nomai-translator-outer-wilds
Naturally, we both thought it was pretty cool. However, I started thinking, what if you could make something like this, but actually functional?
I realised that a lot of technologies to do something like this already kinda exist. OCR, coupled with a translation API, can read whatever you're looking at and translate it. Add on a screen, and you've got something that could effectively do what this device does. For bonus points, you could add on a couple line lasers to mimic the "reading" the original tool does. I also realised I kinda have all the parts necessary for this just...laying around. A Pi Zero to act as the OCR and translation computer, a Pi camera to actually capture the text, and several white-on-blue character LCDs that I feel might match the style of the original screen rather nicely, are all things that I have, and are all effectively going unused at the moment.
With that, I decided I should start on making something like this. Not much has happened just yet, I'm mostly setting up things on the software side, but I do think this could be a pretty cool project, as well as being fairly simple (hopefully).
