Propeller-heads the world over are making good progress towards overcoming cultural barriers. The latest culture-gap-narrower is a new pair of high-tech glasses that translates foreign text into your native language, in real-time, as you look at it. The glasses were unveiled in the Chiba prefecture in Japan recently,  at the Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies trade exhibition according to the Associated Press.

Anyone who has travelled to another country where signs and menus in their home language were few and far between will appreciate such an invention, and it’s especially useful for travellers fond of wandering areas that are far from the tourist trail.

Other functions of these new glasses, which should be ready for commercial sale before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, include facial recognition and the ability to turn any flat surface into a touchscreen.

The glasses don’t have a name yet, and they are far from being available to the general public, but it’s really cool to see these kinds of innovations in the pipeline that don’t have anything to do with Google.