Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Realtime ASCII Goggles

Posted by kdawson on from the through-crt-colored-spectacles dept.

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."

35 of 331 comments (clear)

  1. ASCII and thou shalt receive by Stanistani · · Score: 4, Funny

    Tint it green, have it flow downward, and you're Keanu Reeves...

    --
    You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
    1. Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive by gnarfel · · Score: 4, Funny

      But will it run linux? And, better yet, if it were to kernel panic, what would the world look like?

      --
      Local music(to upstate NY). http://gnarfel.com/ radio.
    2. Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive by nano2nd · · Score: 5, Funny

      ..whoah

      --
      G4 Hackintosh
    3. Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive by jdray · · Score: 4, Funny

      If someone mirrors this site, will all the letters show up backward?

      --
      The Spoon
      Updated 6/28/2011
    4. Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive by pragma_x · · Score: 5, Funny

      I have the same problem. While watching it, I kept expecting to have scenes like this:

      Neo: I totally had this dream where I woke up in a bathtub full of snot, and my head had this gnarly plug hooked into it. Then I went down this awesome waterslide. It was like waterloo, only totally metal.
      Neo: [does air guitar]

      Morpheus: That was no dream. The world as you understand it exists only as a massive simulation, designed and built by the machines, to deceive mankind while harnessing their body heat for energy. You were plugged into the matrix like the others, but we rescued you.

      Neo: [Looks painfully confused]

      Morpheus: [sighs] Up until now, you were a lot like that dude in that song "One" by Metallica.

      Neo: Excellent!

    5. Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive by KDR_11k · · Score: 5, Funny

      Oh wait, wrong movie. Sorry, I just can't ever think of Keanu in anything but Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.


      Judging by his performance neither can Keanu Reeves.
      --
      Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
    6. Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive by somersault · · Score: 4, Funny

      I have a similar program, but with that guy who played Agent Smith. When he turned up in LotR, it totally ruined it for me. I kept saying 'Mr Andersonnnnn' after his lines..

      --
      which is totally what she said
    7. Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive by weirdcrashingnoises · · Score: 4, Funny
      Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

      Neo: o rly?

      Morpheus: ya rly. *hands Neo goggles*

      Neo: ...whoah

      --
      sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
  2. Pointless but cool? by biocute · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not pointless if it's cool, it's just useless.

    --
    Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
    1. Re:Pointless but cool? by j00r0m4nc3r · · Score: 5, Funny

      The goggles, they do nothing!

    2. Re:Pointless but cool? by sayfawa · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ah, but it's not even useless.

      a) enhance the surreality of certain drugs (didn't know surreality was a word, but spellchecker isn't complaining. Interestingly, my spellchecker says spellchecker is spelled wrong.

      b) make sex with unattractive people more fun. Actually, this would make sex with attractive people more fun too. As long as they don't complain about the massive stupid looking goggles you have on. Or the massive thing that powers them and keeps hitting your partner in the ribs.

      --
      Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
    3. Re:Pointless but cool? by QuantumPion · · Score: 4, Informative

      That's actually a common misquote. The real quote is: "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!" This should definitely be one of the tags for this article, especially since the server is down.

  3. ASCII by exploder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  4. Ob. DNA Comment. by Nomen+Publicus · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ah, but can they sense peril?

  5. "Pointless, but cool." by pzs · · Score: 5, Funny

    That should totally be the new tag-line for Slashdot.

    Peter

  6. One camera only... by UfoZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...means you lose depth perception.

    Nice gimmick, though.

  7. ASCII Goodness by kribby · · Score: 5, Funny

    so it's like a pair of beer goggles for nerds?

    1. Re:ASCII Goodness by idontgno · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, right. The last thing we need is a bunch of geeks in wearable computing gear shouting "Yah, Baby, shake your @s!"

      --
      Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
  8. Needs more overlays. by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
    1. Re:Needs more overlays. by MORB · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'd rather have the range/direction to Sarah Connor myself.

  9. I wouldn't say useless. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:I wouldn't say useless. by pragma_x · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'd say that's the tip of the iceberg. Real-time video manipulation has all kinds of crazy implications for various impairments.

      Being able to simulate various types of color-blindness, or color-shift the real world to assist the color-blind are two possibilities. You could also use edge enhancement for people that can't focus too well, brightness enhancement for people who can't see in moderate light, gamma correction for night-blindness, and maybe some kind of stylized "cell shading" for people who have trouble discerning shapes and depth cues (shadows, etc).

      Now, add on some binocular optics (read: conventional glasses) and you can further push the envelope by compensating for astigmatism, lazy eye, and all the rest.

      Also, a lot of CCDs can see in to the near-infrared. So IR-enhanced viewing is also a distinct possibility.

  10. Poor russians by packetmon · · Score: 5, Funny

    They don't have an ASCII representation of a /. effect. So I made one for em:

           ##
          ##
         ##
        ##
       ##
      ##      ###
    ##       ###

    --
    Infiltrated dot Net
    1. Re:Poor russians by TubeSteak · · Score: 4, Funny

      They don't have an ASCII representation of a /. effect. So I made one for em: Here's my rendition:
      404 Error - File Not Found
      --
      [Fuck Beta]
      o0t!
  11. Re:Obligatory by weirdcrashingnoises · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think you mean, In Soviet Russia, goggles ascii you.

    --
    sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
  12. Re:World Cup in ASCII by shades66a · · Score: 4, Informative

    this might of been it ? ascii-wm.net

  13. Videolan has ascii output by DrXym · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Sad but true - you can watch movies in Videolan as rendered into ASCII. You'll find the option by opening the Preferences dialog, checking the "Advanced Options" checkbox, clicking on Output Modules, and selecting "Color ASCII art video output".

    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.

  14. ObPedantic by itsdapead · · Score: 4, Funny

    Tint it green, have it flow downward, and you're Keanu Reeves...

    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.
    1. Re:ObPedantic by Stanistani · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yeah, I was going to insert the clause, 'add unicode and some funky characters,' but I was distracted by the woman in the red dress.

      --
      You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
  15. Come on people by CaffeineAddict2001 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Almost an hour has passed and not one person has claimed to have a screenshot and posted an ASCII goatse.

    1. Re:Come on people by dtoffe · · Score: 5, Funny

      http://goatse.ch/ascii.html

      Done

      --
      --- There is no spoon
  16. Pointless? Useless? I Think Not by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Pointless but cool. Whoever wrote that doesn't have much imagination for application.

    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.
  17. Copy on YouTube, which is not yet Slashdotted by Gulik · · Score: 5, Informative

    I found the video posted on YouTube, for folks (like me) who didn't get to the main site before it started smoking.

  18. Re:Obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    In soviet nethack

    ......
    ..@d..
    ......

    you bite dog for 42 pts damage
    you hear a door burst open!
    you see an old meme shambling toward you
    you activate peril sensitive sunglasses
    the goggles do nothing!
    (moar)

  19. My name... is FRODO! by Pfhorrest · · Score: 5, Funny

    "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."