Slashdot Mirror
Realtime ASCII Goggles
jabjoe writes "Russian artists from Moscow have created goggles with realtime image filtering. Among the Photoshop-like filters that can be applied is, interestingly, ASCII: you can view the world in real time as ASCII. Pointless but cool."
Tint it green, have it flow downward, and you're Keanu Reeves...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
It's not pointless if it's cool, it's just useless.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
I think the ASCII mode would have been cooler if they'd run the edge detect first. As it was, it seemed like the majority of the information rendered was in the brightness of the characters, not in the choice of character for each position.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
Now we all can live life like we are inside a comic book! Drop in the Comix plug-in, and bam!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I'd never get it back. This product has enormous toy potential.
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
You might see ASCII...but all I see is blonde, brunette, redhead...
"My eyes! The goggles do nothing!"
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
In Soviet Russia, world is u.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
A: I don't even see the code. All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
B: I can too you idiot - take those stupid goggles off. You're embarassing me.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Ah, but can they sense peril?
Wonder where he got the idea?
someone shoots an ASCII art porno using these things? The Internet is for porn, after all.
What about peril sensitive filters?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That should totally be the new tag-line for Slashdot.
Peter
...means you lose depth perception.
Nice gimmick, though.
The software side of things was already complete: libaa.
I'm going to guess it's about 2 minutes after it goes on commercial sale before some idiot tries to drive in ASCII. Depth-perception and visibility? Pfft... secondary to being able to see ASCII cars zip by :P
:P
Still, I'd love a pair. Added difficulty to any video game by way of filtering the hell out of it
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
...Moscow? Moderators, set your phasers to redundant.
so it's like a pair of beer goggles for nerds?
This would be really cool with some informative readouts along the edges. Battery power remaining, range to John Connor, progressive sequel crappiness quotient, that sort of thing.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
ASCII are we still in the 80s? Unicode, man, U*N*I*C*O*D*E.
It's useless fun though.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
But will they show you recreations of the death scenes of famous celebrities based on GPS coordinates?
I could see a lot of uses for it. Not nessarly the ASCII Filter but other filters can be nice. Say a brightness filter may make you better able to see in low light. Negitive Filter may help you find Jesus, in cloth. Other Filters could aid learning artest how to draw by removing the natural shading in real life, and break things down into simple shapes. Heck the Ascii filter could probably be good for trainging for sending images on Low Bandwidth networks and having people get the images and decode them easier.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
At the risk of being a karma whore:
"Russian artists from Moscow presented in London the totally useless but somehow cool device - goggles that you can put on and feel yourself like a robot from a Terminator movie or like somebody else from "the cyberspace". See the video below:"
Thanks.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I remember that during the last world cup there was a server that was running the coolest telnet I have ever seen. It was the world cup TV feed filtered into ASCII, so you could actually watch the games over telnet. I was all about it, although I can't remember the server address now. I would be very interested if anyone knew anything else about this, or how it's done, or how I could set it up.
What happens if you watch ASCII Star Wars through the ASCII goggles?
We had some Ultra Sparc and a few VT220 orange dummy terminals where I studied and everyone was using only the Sparcs, even to only check emails, so there were some queues to access the machine. So one day, a friend installed the ASCII version of Quake on the VT220 server to prove you could do almost anything on those craps.
It didn't change anything but damn, that was cool.
I didn't know Osama was so interested in Art, espcially asci art... Good for him, take a break from killing the infidels and contribute something useless to society ;)
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
They don't have an ASCII representation of a /. effect. So I made one for em:
##
##
##
##
##
## ###
## ###
Infiltrated dot Net
Crap, I picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue....
The books main character... McNihil... wow! where did I get my handle... goes around and sees everything in Noire kind of way.
This device is neither pointless nor useless... one can use it to enhance how people view their environs... want everybody to look like hot models... there you go.... you want everybody to be black... there you go... want everybody to look like whatever you like... there you go.
It would be better if there were stereo cameras, and different video going to each eye. I can only guess at the sort of eye strain you'd get with this and ascii mode. Better still, different processing modes in each eye!
Its current configuration may be somewhat useless, but there is a point to goggles which allow overlay. This is essentially synthetic reality. It is my thoughts that soon "goggles" like these will be as common as bluetooth headsets are now - though they will probably be glasses rather than goggles (or perhaps even contacts, eventually).
I don't need to list the plethora of uses for synthetic reality, but even in this nascent stage I could see the ability to increase and decrease contrast as useful - perhaps in searching around for something lost.
This is simply algorithms being applied to a video - with object recognition the potential is large.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
already slashdoted by the folks who have been using ASCII output on mplayer for years...
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
You can get the same effect by combining large amounts of alcohol and playing nethack for 24 hours straight.
That is the most awesome thing ever. But the important questions remain: how about x-ray mode? I guess you could simulate it with some clever color-correction and "find edges" algorithms. I suppose we can look forward to 3 years' worth of music videos filmed with this thing, if not ASCII John Wayne Movie night on Adult Swim or something similar.
stuff |
I see Aliens in ASCII!
Cool but rather useless.
BTW for me at least, the OpenGL driver delivers a far better image under Vista than DirectX. Don't know if this is DRM related or not but the quality is far better.
Unfortunately TFA said ASCII - the Matrix included a lot of Japanese Katakana/Hiragana script so you'd probably need JIS, Unicode or ISO something-or-other...
Also, do not try this at home unless you are The One - otherwise, after ten minutes you'd probably go green and flow downwards.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
More importantly, what effect is it going to have on the Goggle stock price?
Easier than you think. Some low-end Sony video cameras were way to sensitive to IR. The result was an effect very much like X-ray vision. ie. clothing tended to disappear. Interested? Just modify the camera feeding the goggles. Here's how: http://geektechnique.org/index.php?id=254
http://englishrussia.com.nyud.net:8090/?p=1377#mor e-1377
Just don't ask where the "@" goes.
Table-ized A.I.
Almost an hour has passed and not one person has claimed to have a screenshot and posted an ASCII goatse.
In the video the guy says there is no computer or operating system. Maybe its all embedded, but obviously it has a CPU running their software.
As far as being just a toy, this thing could actually be quite useful. It could be used to enhance vision, sort of like Geordi's visor in Star Trek. It could display things outside of human vision, or amplify small differences to make them more apparent. Of course it could be used for night vision too. Personally, I would be interested in the hardware if I write my own software / filters for it. The point is, with this type of augmented vision, the sky's pretty much the limit. Imagine if it was OCRing what you look at real-time, so that you could look at something, and the system could display additional information about uncommon words (nouns like place names, product names, etc).
How about the Photosynth demo Microsoft did, where they would take many 2D images of buildings, and reconstruct them in 3D, allowing the user to zoom in in massive detail (if someone had taken photos of that particular place). If that type of image recognition could be done real-time to match what you are currently looking at, then you could look at the inside of a building without entering it. Or zoom in or out, or pan or change your POV entirely, without actually moving your body.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
They didn't include a "rose tinted" filter. It would be like the best version ever, even if it wasn't.
I've heard they already have plans for their next version! They're going to upgrade the image processing to add scene analysis with an always-on internet connection to a search engine and call them "Googles". <grin>
This technology appears to be a combination of virtual boy and a public access video effects board.
I like the "watcha want" vido by the Beastie Boys and prefer it to this silliness.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's cool for the purpose of art but it really doesn't live up to the name/claims/etc.
The thing that impressed me was I believe I saw a standard Sobel operator filter that extracts lines based on the derivatives of a pixel and its neighbors. Now in computer vision oftentimes this is used to simplify complex scenes so that region/structural analysis can be done.
You know when you're developing computer vision applications for robots, it sure would help to be able to code an algorithm & take it outside to test it against different light sources and scenarios so you get an idea of what needs to be tweaked.
Plus if your robots have hardware restrictions, this system can enforce them to give you an idea of realtime lag.
I could see this being a very valuable tool in the realms of academia & robotics. I realize the original idea is for ACII art, as mentioned, but there are some real applications here.
My work here is dung.
There's a moderately batty man who wanders through the streets with a setup that looks exactly like this. He's trying to remain permanently connected to cyberspace, or something to that effect. Not sure if anyone will know what I'm talking about, though. :)
Gamertag: WyleType
I buy one if I could overlay Q3 style textures over everything. :)
Say selective overlays for different people
Postman becomes zombies and add the sound effects for extra points
It would make my morning commute to work a little more fun
Probably require more CPU horsepower than that little unit could provide
and I suspect the batties would weigh a ton.
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
...Rasputin. Man, I wish I could grow a beard like that. I'd love to look like an insane monk.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Some of the effects look like they were lifted from http://effectv.sourceforge.net/ (windows port http://pbx.mine.nu/effectv/) and if that's the case, where's the source? :)
http://ascii.dyne.org/
Real-time image processing? Though there are all sorts of applications for this technology that are 'useless' there should be plenty of practical ones too. How about low-visibily operations? now it's not just shades of grey or green, but a full-colour daylight equivalent image on your 'night vision' goggles. This could perhaps also be adapted to real-time thermal imaging, or given the ability to 'zoom'. Perhaps those electronic binoculars we've seen in so many SF films and movies aren't that far fetched. I'm not disagreeing with you, but there are almost countless applications to this that haven't been imagined yet. I'm sure no one imagined all the possibilities when the LED was invented and look at how ubiquitious they are.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
I found the video posted on YouTube, for folks (like me) who didn't get to the main site before it started smoking.
Gargoyle lifestyle, here we come.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Now that would be pretty cool.
Combine these goggles with a fisheye lense and this content-aware resizing software. That would be great. Spatially, you'd have some distortion, but the compression software could then work in 4 dimensions instead of 3.
They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!
IBM is building a legacy version of these. The view will be in EBCDIC.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
is blonde, brunette, redhead ;)
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
This pair of goggles could be the prototype of "Virtual Light" eyeglasses which are mentioned in some Sprawn Trilogy novel by noted cyberpunk author William Gibson. Essentially the goggle has memory inside, which stores the fully detailed rebuilding plans for the new eco-friendly Crystal Tokyo meant to replace the war-demolished metropolis or whatever. The goggle is transferred by a courier from the USA to Asia, but he is distracted by a hooker and the Virtual Light eyeglass ends up with the mafia or so and the heroes have to get it back, blah-blah.
The goggles! They do...hey, wait...that's kinda cool!
Pointless but cool? "Pointless" but "cool"? That's what Slashdot is supposed to be ABOUT! No wonder we have all these crap political stories, with an attitude like that.
Just great, now this will give an excuse for goatse to expand beyond the Web!
Goggles modify YOU!
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
.. I know Script-Fu!
which is totally what she said
It's like AdBlock for the real world! I'll take 200 pairs.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
frequencey band compression, by which I mean, turn all the normal colors into shades of green; then shift infrared into red, and ultraviolet into violet/blue...
The visual capabilities of Bees and Rattlesnakes combined... perfect eyeware for bear calvary, vampire ninjas, or lightsaber weilding nazgul.
great for those people who are still suspicious of that new fangled X11 thing.
You must be new here.
I sense a spike in the worldwide use of party drugs with the introduction of this product into the major markets.
You met the Architect? Groklaw's PJ, for real?!
I wonder what hidden properties we could find out about our reality through selective filtering. It would be cool if shifting sky data via a particular matrix revealed a hidden message. What if all the white noise of reality we exist in just needs the right filter to reveal something profound?
I wonder if you could use this to enhance vision by filtering out certain wavelengths or only doing edge detection...
- Yes, I am posting at a -1, and no I will not use a proxy to bypass my circumstances.
Remember the content aware image-resizing algorithm ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg )? Imagine that you had this thing programmed to delete a specific person from a the scene in real time, then put on the goggles. The effect would be so weird, with the scene reshaping itself to hide that person as you both moved!.
Put two sets of googles on two people, and program it so that they can't see each other and let them go.
You definitely need to listen to the intro on this song then:
m acy-hybrid.mp3
http://music.machinaesupremacy.com/machinae_supre
I'm still waiting for the potential hilarity when people start mashing up other movies Weaving has done, like "Transformers".
The Matrix is cool, but now I can finally fulfill my dream of living the my own "Take Me On" video. Now I just need to download the song to my ipod and put it on continuous loop.
...have prior art in this case.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Don't tell the spammers that all you need to do to read a CAPTCHA is to use an ASCII filter.
Totally awesome. I would actually want a non-green-on-black ASCII filter though...VLC has a cool ASCII filter that I always thought would make for an interesting way to watch a movie (or maybe music video).
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Someone found a way to recycle Nintendo's Virtual Boy.
(Quicktime only, but worth it) Get Happy.
The original appears to be down, try http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/vid eo-matrix-goggles-worst-invention-ever-
Just wondering if the text will render in FF00CC?
The Digital Sorceress
More interesting is the application of networked versions of the goggles, it would be then possible to have the field of vision wireframed and allow for many different kinds of detection techniques.
It would also make playing lasertag or paintball much easier...
I can't wait to see a matrix filter on this thing.
As for pointless? You just use a different camera and you have night vision or RF direction finding vision. Seriously powerful stuff waiting to happen!
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
This reminds me of the invention of Bliss in More. Look at your bleak world through Bliss, and everything is bright and joyful.
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
*Rotate the view by 15 degrees. After a day, does your brain straighten it for you? Does it rotate the other way when you take them off?
*Rotate the hue by x degrees? Does your brain correct after time?
*Dampen one of the primary colors, while enhancing the other two. Does your brain compensate after time?
etc...
Is anyone else disappointed that the article link was 1377 and not 1337?
Also, those packs of spectres that seem to hang around all the dark places with barrels of petroleum become a lot less troublesome.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
What will happen if I play Rez with this thing on?
That looks like J. to me. Or maybe it's a hockey stick with a puck.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
This was done 9 years ago: http://web.mit.edu/macdev/asciiMac/, and won the Best Hack (and Victor A-Trap) award at MacHack '98.
when i still did mushrooms and acid?? thinkin' that would have made for interesting trips.
http://www.rialian.com/agentelrond.jpg
First against the wall when the revolution comes
Was that Richard Stallman's Russian counterpart in the video?
"Do you hear that, Mr. Baggins? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound, of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Baggins."
"My name.... is FRODO!"
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Mplayer can too.
Introducing the healthy alternative to drugs! You no longer need to smoke something to achieve psychedelic affects!
The think about this that would be most exciting to me is the ability to merge input from other types of sensors besides a regular camera. What if you had a camer a that could see into infra-red or ultra-violot, or both, and would merge this data with the visible light, and adjust the colors to the spectrum your eyes can see. And that is just the beginning!
I want goggles that I can use to "see" Wifi hotspots! Or what about visualization of bat-style echolocation?
Amateurs
Cool, make it do edge detect and cell shading effects and we could see what it would be like to live in an anime world.
Sweet, bet you could squeeze some money out of those Otaku.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I think the Japanese would love this, if the world was toon-rendered.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
It's funny - game developers attempt to make reality out of something imagined and this guy makes something imagined out of reality. Go figure. :)
Personally, I expected Agent Smith to suddenly break into a musical number...
mplayer tv:// -vo aa
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Obviously wouldn't work for the ascii filter, since it's pretty much guaranteed that a given object would not be aligned to a character boundary for both eyes, but for the other effects it would be that much cooler.
What sound do people on rollercoasters make? Hint: it's not Xbox 360.
Then every day is like being in Japan, and all your old porn will be new again!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
This seems dumb. I mean, people could do this for years with their web cams, and thats essentially all this is. A camera, a monitor, a tiny cpu doing the processing. This is just existing technology being played with and put on youtube. Might as well start linking to the mentos and coke videos.
The article says they're presenting it in London. The video, or at least some portion of it was filmed in Manchester. There's a shot of the 1830's Warehouse at the Museum of Science & Industry, just after the first ASCII shot.
Incidentally, the 1830's Warehouse is where the 50th anniversary fully-functional replica of Baby is housed. (The first ever stored program computer - built by Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn in Manchester in 1948)
...these aren't my real teeth.
there's mplayer with aalib, with libcaca, or even matrixview
Just in case - grasshoppers have eyes that can move independently, so they can focus each eye on different objects. Of course, humans can do that too, but the standard approach is that both eyes look at the same thing, to get "a better picture".
If you happen to be in The Netherlands, visit Museon in The Hague, they have a nice interactive model of a grasshopper's vision system, among many other cool things. If you have children, they'll love it there!
The saddest poem
Mechwarrior! Wireframe view made things so much easier. I can definitely see military applications.
my eyes, the goggles do nothing.
It's good to know that somethings transcend little things like nationalities. Grad students look the same the world over.
I needed a sig so people would know who I am, but I was too drunk to make something witty, so you get this instead.
Post # 1377 shouldn't it be 1337?
Sorry, but; In Russia ... you has the Matrix.
This was shown at Siggraph's CyberFashion Show back in August of 2005. A little old already.
I wandered the convention for a few hours with it - it's monovision, and difficult to walk around with at first. Interesting though, however that's the exact same unit we had then. Alexei had good work, but I'd have assumed it'd be in stereo-vision by the time slashdot caught up.
While they were asleep, if you were to slip these babies onto someone that spent too much time in the late 60's they would wake up to find the most extraordinary of acid flashbacks filling their day. Cruel, but fair, well at least funny.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
So this guy has have just invented Sobel filters? Or is it a slight variation of night vision goggles? Woohoo!
This is nothing new - it's simply and old idea being pushed in a way that appeals to to the "art crowd".
Some of these filters remind me of this claymation video I saw a long time ago.
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
It's just effectv in a box .. noting more nothing less
effectv.sourceforge.net
Tinted glasses are sometimes used by people with autism to decrease the amount of sensory input they receive (making the world a bit easier to be in).
These could help do that, without the loss of detail and luminosity. They would have the added benefit of being customizable.
I saw a guy years ago, trying to build realtime video goggles to filter out aspects of reality he didn't like.
He produced an algorithm to identify rectangles in any orientation in real time video and the device would ask you if you were interested or would prefer not to see it again. Once you decide to filter this particular advert/billboard/hoarding it would recognize future instances of it and replace them with a blank represtentation or something of your choice.
But this was years and years ago.
I am waiting for realtime video overlay, projected onto your retina by tiny lasers. With facial recognition and you will have a HUD tagging people visually with: their name, last time you saw them, any related birthdays coming up and possibly subjects to avoid. Wow that will make meetings/parties/get-togethers easier for me.
Meanwhile, behind the innocent facade of an old hat shop......
My thoughts as well. Can you imagine if they stuck 3 cameras on that thing and did real time HDR imaging? No shadow too dark to hide in. No issues with objects being silhouetted by back light. Tons of options for growth with this project.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The Wheelchair Controlled by Thought and these Russian Goggles could some how be combined..? I'd quite like to never have to bother moving or opening my eyes and this seems like the best solution. Perhaps eventually we can all be heads in a jar, this would also save me having to find clothes that fit me and remove the need to take baths.