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."

ASCII and thou shalt receive

[Stanistani]

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

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[gnarfel]

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

Re:

[TuringTest]

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

Or worse yet, how would the core dump smell?

Re:

[somersault]

Nevermind.. look over there.. blonde.. brunette..

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[nano2nd]

..whoah

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[ystar]

My God!!! It's full of *****s!

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[weirdcrashingnoises]

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

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[pragma_x]

[takes off goggles]

I know... Gimp-fu.

I think you mean..

[somersault]

.. I know Script-Fu!

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[jdray]

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

Re:

[Roy van Rijn]

Pffftt... I can't take this anymore, I've had it! Too many bad jokes for one day!

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[garcia]

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

Totally Excellent!

Oh wait, wrong movie. Sorry, I just can't ever think of Keanu in anything but Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I guess there must be a glitch in the matrix or something...

Re:

[veganboyjosh]

I am an _F_B_I_ A-GENT.

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[pragma_x]

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!

Re:

[AndersOSU]

I like to posit that Keanu Reeves is a fantastic actor, provided his character has no idea whats going on around him, see Bill and Ted, the original Matrix, and A Scanner Darkly, (possibly also the Lake House, but I'm not about to subject myself to that to find out.)

The second Keanu Reeves' character is has a flash of insight, he is completely unbelievable - see, Dracula, Chain Reaction, Matrix 2 and 3, and Constantine.

Movies like Speed, and The Devils Advocate are a mixed bag, the scenes where Keanu is con

Re:

[BobNET]

I like to posit that Keanu Reeves is a fantastic actor, provided his character has no idea whats going on around him

So you're saying he's a good method actor?

Re:

[the_lesser_gatsby]

For a single method - like everybody is.

Re:

[brouski]

I rather liked him in Constantine. I think it suited his...ahem, "minimalist" acting style.

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[somersault]

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..

My name... is FRODO!

[Pfhorrest]

"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!"

Re:

[failure-man]

Who gives a shit? The writers on those movies failed "thermodynamics for poets" like, four times and got switched to "termodynamics for housepets." Which they also failed.

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

[KDR_11k]

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.

ObPedantic

[itsdapead]

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.

Re:ObPedantic

[Stanistani]

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.

Re:

[fm6]

I have to point out that Neo's green-screen vision uses Unicode [wikipedia.org] characters.

And if Neo's such a visionary, why does he use an HGC [wikipedia.org] monitor?

Re:

[eonlabs]

What if you already see the world in ascii?

THE GOGGLES!!! THEY DO NOTHING!!!!

Pointless but cool?

[biocute]

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

Re:Pointless but cool?

[j00r0m4nc3r]

The goggles, they do nothing!

I know kung fu. - No you don't.

[zeromorph]

ASCII are we still in the 80s? Unicode, man, U*N*I*C*O*D*E.

It's useless fun though.

Re:Pointless but cool?

[QuantumPion]

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.

Re:Pointless but cool?

[sayfawa]

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.

Re:

[TheSpoom]

"Oh, don't mind me honey, I'm just going to put on these goggles to make you look more attractive." ...You should totally do this and tell us how it goes. ;^)

Pointless? Useless? I Think Not

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:

[NeilTheStupidHead]

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'

Re:

[loftwyr]

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...

Re:

[jellomizer]

wouldn't that cause bumping into yourself?

ASCII

[exploder]

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.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Faux_Pseudo]

IAAAA (I Am An ASCII Artist)
If brightness of characters is effecting the image then it isn't ASCII, it is ANSI or any number of other things but it isn't ASCII. In ASCII all characters are the same weight.

If ASCII allowed one to use changing character brightness I wouldn't have spent so much time creating all of these [fauxascii.com] because some of the challenge would have been lost.

The ulimate geek necessity!

[downix]

Now we all can live life like we are inside a comic book! Drop in the Comix plug-in, and bam!

Re:

[HTH NE1]

Or how about image substitution so it's like you're wearing the sunglasses from They Live [imdb.com], replacing advertisements with generic placards, and politicians look like alien zombies?

My 12 Year Old Kid Would Love It

[lottameez]

I'd never get it back. This product has enormous toy potential.

Finally, a place to use this quote...

[NotQuiteReal]

"My eyes! The goggles do nothing!"

Re:

[argStyopa]

10 am site posted to /.
10:04 apparently it worked.
10:33 it's down.

More like "My server! The website does nothing!"

Obligatory

[UbuntuDupe]

In Soviet Russia, world is u.

Re:Obligatory

[weirdcrashingnoises]

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

Re:

[Dr. Eggman]

Maybe try:
"In Soviet Russia, ASCII encode you!"

Re:

[sethstorm]

Yes, but the equation behind it is a lot more complex.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Two guys on Moscow street

[PinkyDead]

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.

Ob. DNA Comment.

[Nomen Publicus]

Ah, but can they sense peril?

How long until...

[Anonymous Coward]

someone shoots an ASCII art porno using these things? The Internet is for porn, after all.

More obligatory

[IndustrialComplex]

What about peril sensitive filters?

"Pointless, but cool."

[pzs]

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

Peter

Re:

[19thNervousBreakdown]

# Required by truth in advertising legislation.
TAGLINE="${TAGLINE%, but cool.}"

One camera only...

[UfoZ]

...means you lose depth perception.

Nice gimmick, though.

Re:

[caluml]

I only have one eyeball, you insensitive clod!

Re:

[Mister Whirly]

Not if it is in 3D!

Re:

[Joe Random]

Yes and no. Would you say you lose depth perception while watching a movie?

Of the movie itself? Of course. They came up with 3D movies because regular movies aren't. The difference is that you're not moving through the movie scene, and using the information it provides to manipulate objects. Try spending a day wearing an eyepatch or something, and it'll quickly become apparent why two eyes are better than one.

Re:One camera only...

[ShinmaWa]

Try spending a day wearing an eyepatch or something, and it'll quickly become apparent why two eyes are better than one.

While you are almost certainly right, you'd be amazed how well the mind adapts in such situations. I have no depth perception at all. Zip, zero, none. I can't throw or catch with any semblance of accuracy at all. You'll never find me in the NBA or the NFL. However, for every day activities such as opening doors, driving a car, maneuvering a staircase, and even playing pool/billiards, I'm just fine. I don't find it a hindrance at all for every day activities because my mind has adapted to compensate for my lack of depth perception.

why did it have to be...

[Digitus1337]

...Moscow? Moderators, set your phasers to redundant.

ASCII Goodness

[kribby]

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

Re:

[antifoidulus]

would certainly make going to strip clubs more interesting.

Re:ASCII Goodness

[idontgno]

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

Needs more overlays.

[RobTFirefly]

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.

Re:Needs more overlays.

[MORB]

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

more obscure reference

[Alzheimers]

But will they show you recreations of the death scenes of famous celebrities based on GPS coordinates?

I wouldn't say useless.

[jellomizer]

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.

Re:I wouldn't say useless.

[pragma_x]

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.

Re:

[CrankyFool]

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that VISOR is a fictional instrument, I'll note that we're not talking about the same technology at all -- VISOR transmits images, potentially unaltered, directly to the optic nerve via jacks. These goggles just do image manipulation and present the altered images to the eyes. They'd be of zero use for completely blind people.

Re:

[Poeir]

You could also use them while exploring ancient Chozo ruins.

Article Tesx

[MyLongNickName]

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.

What happens if....

[Hanners1979]

What happens if you watch ASCII Star Wars through the ASCII goggles?

Re:

[Spy der Mann]

If you apply the algorithm to the exact image, it's certain that you'll end up with
the same characters. With the goggles it's different because of scale / rotation / misalignment problems. You'd lose even more quality, some characters being replaced with others.

It reminds me of college

[aadvancedGIR]

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.

Go Osama!

[alta]

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 ;)

Poor russians

[packetmon]

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

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

Re:Poor russians

[TubeSteak]

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

Stereo

[badfringe]

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!

Synthetic Reality Interface Device Prototype.

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

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.

Re:

[autophile]

Dude, these are artists. The closest these guys will get to synthetic reality is Pointillism.

--Rob

x-ray mode, movie night?

[192939495969798999]

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.

Videolan has ascii output

[DrXym]

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.

Come on people

[CaffeineAddict2001]

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

Re:Come on people

[dtoffe]

http://goatse.ch/ascii.html [goatse.ch]

Done

No computer or OS?

[Dan East]

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 [ted.com] 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

release 2.0

[martyb]

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>

Anyone watch Serial Experiments Lain?

[GammaKitsune]

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. :)

Lain is a decent example... but...

[meringuoid]

Snow Crash is a better one.

Gargoyle lifestyle, here we come.

Quake 3 overlay

[IckySplat]

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.

HasciiCam

[danEger]

http://ascii.dyne.org/ [dyne.org]

Copy on YouTube, which is not yet Slashdotted

[Gulik]

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

All I see...

[PigleT]

is blonde, brunette, redhead ;)

What I want

[Kaenneth]

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.

Re:World Cup in ASCII

[shades66a]

this might of been it ? ascii-wm.net

Re:

[Crudely_Indecent]

Easy 'nuf...

Get yourself a capture card (or camera) and pipe the input through VLC at the command line. VLC can be compiled with ascii-art libraries and you can do this yourself (only, it's not just green, ascii-art library processes colors too)

It's dead simple, but not useful enough for me to do it twice.

Re:

[theGreater]

Would the result be a video stream with an ASCII filter applied, or an actual character stream?

-theGreater.

Re:

[Crudely_Indecent]

Output to the screen is in ascii, if run as an application within something like telnet, ascii characters would be transmitted, not video.

When trying this technique, it's important to execute VLC outside of X11 (not sure how this would operate in Windows...that's not my bag). I used font selection to get smaller ascii-character "pixels".

Re:

[whathappenedtomonday]

I remember I tried it a dozen times and it never worked, the server was constantly stalled during games. I watched the Deep Throat ASCII conversion vid, instead. More balls in there than in any soccer game, no kidding! Can't find the bookmark right now, but google is (evil and) your friend.

Oh, how to do it / set it up? No idea, but you might just preorder the goggles from TFA. Or read up on real time image filtering of live video sources.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You might see a Matrix reference, but all I see a string of worn out quotes. A Beowulf cluster of worn out quotes, where in Soviet Russia quote wears out you. Where I for one welcome our new worn out quote overlords. And My Eyes!! The worn out quotes do nothing.