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

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

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

..whoah

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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

[takes off goggles]

I know... Gimp-fu.

I think you mean..

.. I know Script-Fu!

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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

Re:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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!

"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:ASCII and thou shalt receive

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

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

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.

Pointless but cool?

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

Re:Pointless but cool?

The goggles, they do nothing!

Re:Pointless but cool?

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?

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.

Pointless? Useless? I Think Not

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.

ASCII

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.

My 12 Year Old Kid Would Love It

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

Re:Obligatory

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

Re:Obligatory

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

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.

Ah, but can they sense peril?

"Pointless, but cool."

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

Peter

One camera only...

...means you lose depth perception.

Nice gimmick, though.

Re:One camera only...

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...

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

ASCII Goodness

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

Re:ASCII Goodness

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.

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.

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

more obscure reference

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

I wouldn't say useless.

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.

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.

Article Tesx

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.

Re:World Cup in ASCII

this might of been it ? ascii-wm.net

Poor russians

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

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

Re:Poor russians

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

Synthetic Reality Interface Device Prototype.

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.

Videolan has ascii output

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

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

Re:Come on people

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

Done

No computer or OS?

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

Quake 3 overlay

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.

Copy on YouTube, which is not yet Slashdotted

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.