Google Lens, which is Google’s camera-based AR technology baked into Android phones, is evolving rapidly in 2018 and is becoming closer to what people imagined magical real-time augmented reality would be. It can recognize text and translate or copy it, recognize objects and search for related matches, and even see posters and pop out videos and related news. At the Google I/O developers conference, it was demonstrated how Android cameras can recognize the world and overlay head-up directions using Google Maps. While there aren’t many good AR headsets yet that use cameras to intelligently analyze the world on the fly, Google believes that smart AR needs to remain practical for now and focus on enhancing what users see with information. Lens feels like a push toward the future of computer vision where apps “know” what the camera is “seeing,” and it may be doing what glasses can’t before anyone makes a killer pair of smartglasses.