Slashdot Mirror
The ASCII Cam
griffjon writes "The folks over at Dyne.org have hacked together a method to take live camera feed and turn it into ascii-character video on Linux. You can get the latest release, or see screenshots from a live stream. Y'know, this kinda ascii could be good random noise input for a cipher."
True, however that's assuming the camera is pointed at a person sitting in front of a computer. Aim it at clouds, or a busy street, or a water fountain or something that's constantly changing. Interesting idea anyway.
He should only be using mono ascii, using gray characters is cheating!
:)
"am I naked in this ASCII dump or not" dot com...
A friend used this to alter the display of the World Series in a bar. That was interesting.
http://anux.angel.net/asciicam/
Notre Dame once had an ASCII version of a cam that was watching the dome of a building on campus. You could even telnet to some port of some system to see a "movie" of the last 24 hours or so of feed. I think I remember seeing it 5 or 6 years ago...
Deep Throat in ASCII
:)
Don't say I never gave you anything
IRNI
You're such a troll!
I can see it now,
...
To send me encrypted mail:
Run the end credits of Debbie Does Dallas backwards through the Elmer Fudd biff filter and use results as pgp key data.
Oh yeah
Grell
"May you live In Fortean Times"
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
well, maybe not quite the same thing. I don't think the ascii dome cam is quite live. but it's still tons o' fun.
The Lab for Scientific Computing at the University of Notre Dame has, for many years now, had a Dome Cam set up with an optional ascii version. So this isn't that new. http://lisa.ee.nd.edu/DomeCam/. Of course, it seems to be down right now...
People are starving to death in the world, and you had time for this?!!
Frank W. Miller
- Stick a lava lamp in front of it, and you`re sorted!
You mean like this?There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
The gimp I believe has had a plugin to do this, just not on the fly. I'm sure it wouldn't be a super-huge task for any experienced coder to adapt it for this purpose.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Is there a page that describes how to do this?
(Even just a man page reference would work...)
I gotta try it on my Indy.
--K
i know i know cause we can
This gives an entirely new meaning to pr0n on webcams ;)
My little sad piece of the internet: www.mtndewd
maybe i should read other's posts before I do ;)
i'm too late all of the time, and i tend to repeat someone else's idea =)
My little sad piece of the internet: www.mtndewd
I clicked on the link before seeing your warning, it was just a webpage for a lavalamp graphic means for producing random numbers. I didn't find it very exciting, but it certainly wasn't anything like goatsex... what am i missing?
--
RumorsDaily
just use something like .5 | \
acquire_image | anytopnm | pnmscale
ppmquant -fs -2 | pnmtopgm | pgmtopbm | \
pbmtoascii -2x4 >foo.txt
(where acquire_image is a suitable program, which spits an image in any format out of the desired source)
Here's a more complete list...open these in a new browser and hit stop as soon as they come up, if possible. Some seem to have stupid auto-reload next tags in them. :-(
r g/hasciicam001.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam002.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam003.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam004.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam005.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam006.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam007.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam008.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam009.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam010.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam011.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam012.html+&hl=en
r g/hasciicam013.html+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
tagline
... hi bingo
actually, I read about a group who was doing just that (in some old issue of wired, I think). they used a bank of video cameras set up in front of lava lamps (good for random input) then hashed the video feeds into a string of nice random noise.
it's actually a clever way to get a reasonable level of randomness (cheaper than renting atmospheric noise collectors, another method I've heard of).
sean
Which characters specifically?
Think about it --- it *is* an 8-bit grayscale, with predefined gray levels. Each character is a different number of lit pixels, and, when used *as* pixels, can be used to simulate gray levels. That's why advanced (i.e., non-linedrawing) ascii art works.
If you look closely, they also choose which character to use depending on local line features. So you have 4 bits color, 4 bits char choice (just to throw out some numbers).
Arguably, they would be better off with a 2x2 pixel x 2 bit grey decomposition, from a pure fidelity point of view, but using ascii is really cool. I was actually a bit dissapointed there was grey-scale at all. Just using different chars for that (".+*" for light through dark grey, "|-\/" for edge features, f.ex) would have been cooler, IMANHO.
that should be $DISPLAY for telnet...
No sooner do the first post trolls appear and the site is slashdotted.
"gives you the coolest .plan you ever had"
:)
Maybe that what got John Carmack started too?
Thomas S. Iversen
They should replace the cam occasionally with a prerecorded ASCII Doom feed.
-Moondog
One might even go so far as to say that greyscale characters could be considered ANSI, not ASCII. One might go even further and say that encoding an ANSI picture as a PNG makes it nothing more than a very low-res graphic.
If this ascii webcam thing is just for fun, though, then hey, nice job. It's probably pretty educational to write something like that.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
Anyone interested in a project to add cacheing of links in stories to slashcode please email me.
Obviously this is something that is desperatly needed.
Or you could use this php Image To HTML Text Converter by Markus Dobel.
echo $email | sed s/[A-Z]//g | rot13
Sounds like a good place for a webcam.
My Public Key can be found in a fake rock by my front door.
Uhm... I think that's a guy.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Don't know about that, man. I'm still twitching from playing textmode quake, and that was last night. It's like listening to a Philip Glass 'opera', only for the eyes rather than the ears. *shudder*
-- Count Spatula: The Culinary Vampire "...because my cooking sucks."
oh well,
never thought about using hasciicam for chyphering
if you do so be sure to check out the flag into hasciicam.c that says:
ascii_parms.randomval = 0;
further info on aalib documentation (info aalib)
slow down
to see asciicam on lynx you need to customize size of rendered html
hey man
i said CONSOLE LIVE MODE screenshots
how can i show you that without images?
png are done with gimp without editing
tell me more about your problems...
Now I can watch the game truly live on my C-Phone.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
IANAProgrammer, but isn't this a pretty basic use of aalib?
How long before that goatse guy gets a hold of this?
I used the NetPBM suite to convert goatse.cx's "The Receiver" image to ASCII. It didn't look very good.
Oh, and IANTGCG (I am not the Goatse.cx guy).
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Wow, so, this is more or less what you end up seeing if you look at the Matrix in raw form long enough, eh? (Although I still would have a hard time noticing an agent versus a doberman, but hey, I just need practice, right.)
Incidentally, does anyone know where to get a green filter for my upcoming ascii-cam?
--
(For those who played Acrophobia a long time ago, I'm already crawling toward the couch.)
not only has SGI done the lavalamp for randomness, when Chris Pirazzi was there in 94 or 95 he made something called ttyvideo that works with any video-input-equipped workstation such as an Indy. Downloadable source & info:
i .c om/cpirazzi/ttyvideo.html+ascii+video+sgi+site:rea lity.sgi.com&hl=en
http://reality.sgi.com/cpirazzi/ttyvideo.html
but since reality.sgi.com is down more often than not, you ought to hit the google cache at:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:reality.sg
after it fails to load directly.
cheers
I would want to see some analysis of this before I trusted it as a randomness source, for seeding, etc. I see a lot of repeated characters in the screen shot ('#', 'V', etc.). It could be that the ascii imaging translation method introduces too much predictability.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
I started using the net in 1992. I was a sophomore in high school, and I worked over the summer at the Naval Research Lab in Virginia studying solar flares. They had mosaic. But at that time, I believe they had just added support for gifs, and *everyone* was complaining about how certain sites took up too much bandwidth, and about how Netscape was adding all this "proprietary" tag support, for jpegs and other stuff...
I ask you, what happened??? All those people who complained didn't have a clue... The web has evolved for the better, just like everything else. Those people who don't accept the change are not just conservative, they're wrong.
this isn't new. SGI's do ASCII feeds off their cams too...
Were that I say, pancakes?
You've been able to do that with SGs for ages. We have a SG cam hooked up to an Indy box that we can record and convert into *animated* ascii that will play back in a terminal.
If you look closely, you can see a carrot ( ^ ) in that guy's nose.
For a really good random number, try this: http://lavarand.sgi.com/
-- mrclean
-------Link established-----------
;i)XOHTii==+;):);):););)++=iILHOXT
;i)OXXTi=++;;;::::::::::;;;==i)LHL=
:i)OXI)ii))))=;::,:;+)T))))====LHH+
:iii)ii====+==i))=;)i==+++++=+=i=++
:)))ii==)I))T))i)iiii=i====i,,
;))i=i===)I)))i))))+=+++=i:,,
;ITL)LTii++++++++i))i=i)ITII+
:)IIII)TIiiiii=+;+++==++==i))=III)))I
...Hello ? ... can you ..read me ???.. :)
(==HELLo=Hihi=)
GUIGNOLISNOTDEAD(YET)!!
YUPIYUPIBORNTOBEALIVEANYWAY
+iHOXXHTIii==ii)IIII)i)))THXXHOL;
=iTXXHTi===;;;:::::::::;;;+=iILXXO+
+ii)LiiIii)TI))T)+;TI)iT)TIi===I)ii
=iiii++;+;;;=)i+;=i=;;;;;;++=i=+
))i)==++;++=)i++ii=++;;+===i=;
))I))i==iiii=++++i==)iII=,
=)ITIL)iiLHIi+==i)H==++=i)I)TII;
feww.. managed to post this as no junk
When I was in college I used to convert pictures over to acii all the time so I could send pictures to friends who used pine.
this project was called lavarand. i spoke to the guy who started this about 3 years ago, smart guy.
heres the url for more info:
http://lavarand.sgi.com
.brad
Drink more tea
organicgreenteas.com
flesh eating ants records
What people object to is high bandwidth crap. Useless text at least loads quickly. Waiting forever for a page to load only to find it's useless is a pain.
Real (crazy) men would use PETSCII.
Imagine a one-time pad encrpytion using this stuff... if you want to decode the message you have to watch the video. :-) I suppose synchonization issues would be pretty tough to compensate for though.
Humorless sig goes here.
wow.. that is really cool!
You were using netscape in 1992?
creation science book
they probably use aalib. big deal.
i built a scanning camera that did this using a TRS-80 (actually an Altair III converted to be compatible with the TRS-80) and some parts from radio shack in 1980 or thereabouts.
ASCII hacks are so 1990s... and besides, nothing will ever beat ASCII Quake...
yawn!!!
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Maybe ANSI cam. Seiously, this reminds me a little of BBS ANSI art of the 80s/early 90s. Anybody remember THEDraw?
And you act like a frog.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, post on Slashdot about it.
The size and detail on the image was QUITE impressive for an 8K file (I clicked on the HTML image). While this won't evolve into any sort of standard video-conferencing format, it might be a cool alternative to live webcams for people with slower dial-up access.
:-P Anyone who can't get in, check back in a couple days. Very cool software (and I remember trying to draw cool ascii art myself from a keyboard way back in boring highscool computer classes)
Sadly, the slow loading speed may mean the site's been slashdotted already
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Of course, her favorite phrase is, "your face is gonna freeze like that!"
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Someone clearly has too much time on their hands,
/. so slow today,, hmm oh well nevermind
try to guess who, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
Besides from that it's a nice hack.
Now why is
sql>optimize table USER_COMMENTS
--------
Since the site seems to be /. already here is a link to the google cache:
ascii.dyne.org
"it could just be the midgets. You've got to be careful with midgets in Spandex." --Jamie Richardson
...the best, most ridiculous, and most redundant graphical implementation of ASCII since textmode Quake.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
a man of letters.
My other sig is extremely clever...
It's a bit blurry in ASCII and all, but it sure looks like him. I thought he was dead. Turns out he's hacking web cams. Go figure.
That would have been proactively taking steps to avoid the /. effect. (And I wouldn't have had to wait 30 seconds to see the image!)
Well, if it is in ASCII, it saves bandwidth, but you lose A LOT of detail. If an ASCII is 8-bit, why not simply use a 255 color gray scale? That would be the same amount of data, but would look better! D'oh.
Useless, but still, this is pretty cool!
ASCII PORN!
ASCII, is there anything it can't do?
http://www.asciipr0n.com/ I am a comand line only person and i loved it when I found this little site on alt.ascii-art now if only we could get some streaming video on the comand line to go with the seejgep, fbi, fbv, zgv apps then i would never have to boot to a GUI again.
Soon i can get me some ascii pr0n
Get all the live video feeds over telnet.. w00t!
#include
Great, now the trolls will submit pictures of themselves so we can hunt them down.
For those that avoided this movie (good choice!), our hero as played by Keanu "Whoa" Reeves, encodes a large block of data in his mind by using 3 random images from television. The recieving end would have gotten the images by one means while Keanu's character would have travelled a different route, as such to protect the data. Of course, that's not at all how smoothly it works out...
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
There have been camera systems that output to teletypes as far back as the early 1970s, when ASCII was all you could get.
I swear that guy is Frank Zappa.
I had to chuckle over the ``color gray scale'' phrase.
Also, the human eye can not detect much difference in gray levels once you get to about 64 levels; any more than that and your gilding lilies. But then, I supposed it doesn't hurt to go ahead and use the whole byte. :-)
All in all, I've got to say: ``Kudos to the author!'' This is one of the coolest things I've seen in quite a while. Not everyone's got a T1 into their home and this package could make crude but servicable video conferencing available for people on a budget... or can't afford a fat pipe... or live too far away from the CO for ADSL. Now I'm wondering how cheaply I can get a camera for the PCs at home...
\begin{aside}
Back in my grad school days I was doing programming involving image compression techniques (Hadamard, Haar, DCT, etc.), Viterbi encoding, etc. for use over noisy channels and the only output device I had easy access to that could produce a viewable image was the monster IBM band printer. We had some programs to produce output like the hasciicam only it used overstrikes to create much of the gray scale levels. (Other folks eventually got used to seeing before-and-after images hanging from the walls like wallpaper.) We eventually got (for another study) a thermal printer but was a pain to use (serial input from the mainframe, required expensive paper that turned yellow green after a while, etc.) This brings back some memories.
\end{aside}
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
So you wouldn't want to be filming a blank WALL, but if you took a snapshot of a plant, a messy desktop, of even a face (or other body parts), (i.e. any image with lots of noise) this would be an interesting vector to play with. I haven't read the source to see what size pool of ascii characters they're choosing from, so it may be too small to provide good security. Might be good for the first xor block in a CBC cipherstream.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
looks like he is holding a marijuana cigarette, some of that good ole reefer, maaan!
cpeterso
Y'know, this kinda ascii could be good random noise input for a cipher."
IMHO, it would be an extremly bad source of random noise. Large chunks of the image would be the static bits of the image, and the rest of it would be fairly repetitive - the face of whoever sat infront of the computer, or whatever.
would you have to battle the grammar nazi's of /.?
Only if they commited a Capital crime.
for identifying people with dodgy characters?
Here's a google cache link to one of the screenshots:
r g/hasciicam001.html+&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.o
...using this as a video filter. They might turn out cheaper & actually on time (they could just use stunt doubles for the most part). Just have to substitute that funky green Matrix font for plain old ASCII....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
You know, with all the green letters on the sample screenshot pages, I get the feeling I'm watching The Matrix live!
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://lavarand.sgi.com/
Train a camera on some lava lamps. Take a picture. Process bit stream. Random numbers.
The processing used to generate the ascii art here would probably reduce the randomness. Sorry. Try again.
--
With ssh you can forward an X11 connection and with telnet you can set the $HOST variable and maybe mess with xhost to do something similiar, thus high quality porn via telnet/ssh has existed almost as long as telnet/ssh.
Nice to see a full open source release though rather than just an IRIX binary.
--LP
I was playing with a package called aatv the other day that did this.
:)
:)
I dont have much else to say about it
(pls dont mod me down, I'm not logged in and dont have the oportunity to dselect the 'add 1 pt karma thing
Acctualy this has been possible for a long time, even when overlooking the obvious X11 forwarding. The plaympeg program (created by lookigames I think.) can play mpeg encoded data in textmode.
Karma: 2.71828182846 (Mostly due to small, fun pills)
I mean I used the stuff with my web cam and this is what it spit out...
O
-+-
|
^
I always thought those webcams were a huge waste of bandwidth. At least turning it into ASCII keeps the waste at a minimum.
-Karl
The ship is quiet and dark. Everyone is asleep.
INT. MAIN DECK
The core glows with monitor light. Cypher is in the operator's chair as Neo cones up behind him.
CYPHER
Whoa! Shit, Neo, you scared the bejeezus out of ne.
NEO
Sorry.
CYPHER
No, it's all right.
NEO
What are you doing?
CYPHER
Midnight watch.
Neo's eyes light up as he steps closer to the screens that seem alive with a constant flow of data.
NEO
Is that... ?
CYPHER
An ASCII web-cam? Yeah.
The monitors are packed with bizarre characters and fuzzy shapes.
CYPHER
I've been watching it so long, I can make everything out. It used to be blonde, brunette, redhead... but now it's nothing more than a bunch of geeks with too much time on their hands.
Neo nods.
CYPHER
You want a drink?
He pours Neo a drink from a large plastic jug.
Neo takes a sip and it almost kills him. Cypher pounds on his back.
CYPHER
Good shit, huh? Dozer makes it... calls it Jolt. It's good for two things: degreasing engines and keeping coders awake.
Red-faced, Neo finally stops coughing.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
Still just making a picture look like that deserves some credit
Never knock on Death's door:
The Anti-Blog
nope, i did not used that code
i started coding hasciicam on the code from xawtv's webcam by gerd knorr
the idea to make it html is the new thing
i'm not the first putting ascii into video !
The examples I could see before it has been slashdotted were all converted to pictures (i think gif's)
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Y'know, this kinda ascii could be good random noise input for a cipher.
Same can be said for random irrelevant slashdot taglines...
// zyqqh
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
John
John
How long before that goatse guy gets a hold of this?
--
www.scorbett.ca
Being one of the Inventors of this (Beer Inspired) technique I have have a a lot of intrest in it.
Also, There will be a new website comming up in the near future http://www.lavarand.org (no link since it is not on the air yet) with new an improved access to a lavarand system.
Note the the intrested, the patent only covers using the data to seed a pseudo-random number generator ...
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
The ascii cam is cool, but it doesn't really use ascii because if converts the ascii to png. Because of that it doesn't really help to limit bandwidth, a real ascii stream could give a streaming fluent image even to modem users, that is completly imposible with this png streaming, you couldn't watch the stream with lynx,too.
I think they should have used telnet for this stream.
Jan
There are also html screenshots, Here
Isn't use of greyscale sort of cheating?
screenz? i really have difficultiez respecting those that use z'z to pluralize their wordz.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
to identify victims of vowel play.
You'd have to keep it running consonantly, of course.
Now all we need is a way of being able to port the images into ascii quake, so we can frag friends in glorious ascii-colour(tm)
:)
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:ascii.dyne.or g/+&hl=en
Oh, wait... I don't have ANSI terminal emulation enabled in Netscape... nevermind :)
Ahh, the good old BBS days. It's great that they now have "live webcam" functionality for systems like that, 10 years after they're useful :)
lavarand!
walking past a fishbowl at SGI and seeing a bunch of "heat lamps" [sic] was pretty trippy...
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yeah, there's really nothing better for cryptography than a repeating stream!
--
Damn site doesn't work on Lynx. What good is an ASCII-cam that won't work on Lynx?
Linux is only 5 years behind... I used something when I worked at SGI with my Indycam to display the output of the camera in an xterm in ASCII.
I found this webpage (circa 1995) detailing the software. Congrats Linux you've revolutionalized the computer industry again. I hope you at least stole *some* of the code before creating this new and wonderful tool...
http://reality.sgi.com/cpirazzi/ttyvideo.html
no egg!
Keine eier
Finally video Pr0n at work! woohooo!
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Hey, she's a hottie! ...or is that a man?
Don't tell amihotornot.com about this technology...
--
MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)