Outer Wilds fan makes a functional version of the alien translator

rockpapershotgun.com:

The enigmatic system of Outer Wilds is packed with scary things you wouldn’t want running around in real life: spine-tingling cosmic anglerfish, endless time loops, and a bunch of existential dread. (Oh, wait a minute.) Although, the spacefaring adventure has at least one tool that would be handy in everyday situations: the translator. One Redditor has thankfully recreated a functional version of the translator and this clip shows the delightfully faithful tool.

The revolving planets in Outer Wilds have walls full of an ancient hieroglyphic language that you can scan and then translate onto a blue handheld screen. Redditor u/Snicker-Snag’s tool supposedly translates Spanish, French, and Japanese into English. So, it’s not the latest in Hearthian technology, although it looks exactly like the in-game tool.

“This translation isn’t actually handled on the device,” u/Snicker-Snag explained through a comment. “The device captures an image then sends it to my phone over bluetooth to use Android's offline image-to-text and machine translation APIs.” Their phone then sends the translation back to the blue screen to be displayed. The can of marshmallows in the video, however, is empty. But I’ll ignore that lore inaccuracy due to how obviously impressive the device is.

The origin of the device is quite simple: “I played the Outer Wilds back around the end of 2022 and got the idea in my head at some point that a functional translator should exist,” says u/Snicker-Snags. They “might eventually post all the files” for the project online, which would allow fans to create their very own replicas or improve upon the already-great work that’s here. Sounds almost like a missed merchandising opportunity for Mobius Digital and/or