Reviewer’s Guide

Five minutes, five hidden details, five first-time gotchas.

Everything you need to write about Lupa Vision in a single sitting. Open it, follow the tour, glance at what most reviewers miss, and skim the gotchas so the edge cases don’t catch you off-guard.

Questions, review codes, additional materials: press@lupa.vision · lupa.vision/press

The 5-minute tour

What to try, in order.

Each step takes under a minute and lights up a different surface of the app. Do them in sequence on a real printed page — a paperback works, the back of a cereal box works, this PDF on a second screen works.

  1. 1

    Aim.

    Open Lupa. Hold the phone over a printed paragraph, ~25 cm above the page. The live view bows outward like a real glass lens — that’s a Metal shader, not a CSS filter. The page should stabilize and stay sharp.

  2. 2

    Tap.

    Tap any word on the visible page. The selection bubble springs into place like a drop of water; the definition card slides up from below. Total time from tap to definition: under two seconds, on-device.

  3. 3

    Pull for AI.

    On the definition card, pull down. The card transitions from the offline dictionary to a contextual AI reading — same word, but now interpreted against the surrounding sentence. Free tier gets five of these per day.

  4. 4

    Voice.

    Close the card. Hold a finger anywhere on the live view and say a word you can see. Lupa picks it out of the page for you — no typing, no need to aim at the exact spot. Works in good light, with reasonable diction.

  5. 5

    Save.

    From any definition card, tap the star. The word lands in your Glossary, visible from the user menu or the Today’s Word Home Screen widget. Tap the menu icon to see the day’s lookups.

Five hidden details

Easy to miss. Worth a sentence.

Lupa rewards a slow look. These are the choices most reviewers don’t notice — and the ones we’d want you to mention.

  1. 1

    Barrel distortion is real-time, not a still filter.

    The page bows outward through a Metal shader (vertex + fragment) running at 60 fps on the live camera feed. The OCR engine reads the undistorted frame; the distortion is purely a visual effect. Touch coordinates reverse-map through the lens function before the word lookup happens.

  2. 2

    The selection bubble has water-drop physics.

    A spring animation with subtle wobble. Tilt the phone after tapping — the bubble settles like liquid. Built on SwiftUI animation, not a sprite.

  3. 3

    The front camera renders inside the lens.

    Optional, off by default. When on, the front camera composites a faint reflection of the reader into the glass — a quiet detail for the person paying attention. Multi-cam session, two AVCaptureVideoDataOutputs running simultaneously, recorded nowhere.

  4. 4

    Cormorant Garamond meets Inter.

    Display type is Cormorant Garamond — the serif you find in literary publishing. Body and UI is Inter. The pairing is intentional: the app reads like a book about books.

  5. 5

    Two-second access from anywhere on iOS.

    Action Button (iPhone 15 Pro+), Control Center widget, Lock Screen Voice Search widget, Home Screen Today’s Word widget, and the Shortcuts app — every system entry point Apple opened in iOS 17–18 is wired up. Open Lupa, then start reading, isn’t the path. Open the book, then summon Lupa, is.

Five first-time gotchas

Edges to know before they bite.

Nothing here is a bug — these are intentional behaviors that surprise first-time users. Surfaced up-front so the edges don’t blindside a review.

  1. 1

    The trial requires a Lupa sign-in.

    The 7-day free trial is server-managed (so it carries across devices and reinstalls). It runs through Apple, Google, or email sign-in — not Apple ID alone. Reviewers who skip sign-in still get the StoreKit introductory offer ($2.99 first month / $24.99 first year), which is the path most users take.

  2. 2

    Free tier caps Lupa AI at five lookups per day.

    The on-device dictionary is unlimited on free. The contextual AI reading (the ‘Pull for AI’ layer) resets daily; the sixth attempt routes through the paywall. Translate-Premium-only is intentional — the AI costs money per call.

  3. 3

    Saving a photo of the page is opt-in.

    In Settings, “Save Media” is off by default. Turn it on if you want each lookup to keep a snapshot of the surrounding page (useful for translators). Voice clips follow the same toggle and are discarded immediately if it’s off.

  4. 4

    Voice will tell you when the mic didn’t catch a word that’s on the page.

    If you hold-and-speak a word that’s NOT visible in the current OCR result, Lupa surfaces a small hint pill rather than silently failing. The fix is usually to re-aim, not to repeat — the camera is the authority.

  5. 5

    The paywall is context-aware, not gate-on-launch.

    You can use Lupa for days without ever seeing the paywall. It appears at specific upgrade triggers: hitting the AI daily limit, trying voice while signed out, trying to save a snapshot, trying to use a Glossary entry past the 20-item free cap. Reviewers expecting an aggressive paywall on first launch will not find one.

Press contact

A human reads press@lupa.vision and replies within 24 hours, weekends included during launch windows.

Full press kit at lupa.vision/press — fact sheet, founder story, brand kit ZIP, native-resolution screenshots, demo videos.

Lupa Vision · Orange Hill GmbH · Vienna