By Evan Ackerman
Reading is such hard work without the internet at your disposal to cross reference anything that you don’t immediately understand. Until now, people had to read books while at the computer if they wanted to look stuff up, manually typing it in to Wikipedia or Google. It’s horrible, I know. The Dixau text scanner from Korean company Unichal makes is so that you only have to be next to the computer. It contains a little camera that is able to take pictures of text, recognize the characters, and then provide on-screen explanations via search engines.
The Dixau may seem totally superfluous (especially for $90), but what I think it’s designed for are Korean students who want to be able to translate words from English scientific texts on the fly. And with that in mind, it really could be useful even for native English speakers trying to decipher English scientific texts. I mean, I majored in geology, which is perhaps not the most technical of disciplines, and I still swear that half of those words were made up just to confuse people.