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Realtime ASCII Goggles 331

Posted by kdawson
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."
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Realtime ASCII Goggles More

Realtime ASCII Goggles

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  • ASCII and thou shalt receive (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stanistani (808333) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:03AM (#20494653) Homepage Journal
    Tint it green, have it flow downward, and you're Keanu Reeves...

  • Pointless but cool? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by biocute (936687) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:03AM (#20494657) Homepage
    It's not pointless if it's cool, it's just useless.

    • Re:Pointless but cool? (Score:5, Funny)

      by j00r0m4nc3r (959816) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:06AM (#20494695)
      The goggles, they do nothing!

    • Re:Pointless but cool? (Score:5, Funny)

      by sayfawa (1099071) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:21AM (#20494925)
      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.
      • "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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by eldavojohn (898314) * <my/.username@@@gmail.com> on Thursday September 06 2007, @12:05PM (#20495537) Journal

      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.
      • 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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by loftwyr (36717)
        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...

  • ASCII (Score:5, Insightful)

    by exploder (196936) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:04AM (#20494659) Homepage
    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.
    • Glad someone else noticed that
    • 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.

  • Now we all can live life like we are inside a comic book! Drop in the Comix plug-in, and bam!
    • 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 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lottameez (816335) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:04AM (#20494675)
    I'd never get it back. This product has enormous toy potential.
  • "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!"

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by argStyopa (232550)
      10 am site posted to /.
      10:04 apparently it worked.
      10:33 it's down.

      More like "My server! The website does nothing!"
  • In Soviet Russia, world is u.

  • Two guys on Moscow street (Score:3, Funny)

    by PinkyDead (862370) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:08AM (#20494715) Journal
    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. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Nomen Publicus (1150725) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:08AM (#20494717)
    Ah, but can they sense peril?

  • How long until... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    someone shoots an ASCII art porno using these things? The Internet is for porn, after all.
  • What about peril sensitive filters?

  • "Pointless, but cool." (Score:5, Funny)

    by pzs (857406) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:09AM (#20494743)
    That should totally be the new tag-line for Slashdot.

    Peter

  • One camera only... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UfoZ (680310) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:10AM (#20494751) Homepage
    ...means you lose depth perception.

    Nice gimmick, though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by caluml (551744)
      I only have one eyeball, you insensitive clod!

  • why did it have to be... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Digitus1337 (671442) <lk_digitus@hotmail . c om> on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:11AM (#20494779) Homepage
    ...Moscow? Moderators, set your phasers to redundant.

  • ASCII Goodness (Score:5, Funny)

    by kribby (964773) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:12AM (#20494795)
    so it's like a pair of beer goggles for nerds?

  • Needs more overlays. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rob T Firefly (844560) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:13AM (#20494801) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • more obscure reference (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alzheimers (467217) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:14AM (#20494823)
    But will they show you recreations of the death scenes of famous celebrities based on GPS coordinates?

  • I wouldn't say useless. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jellomizer (103300) * on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:15AM (#20494833)
    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. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pragma_x (644215) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:39AM (#20495199) Journal
      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: (Score:2)

      by Poeir (637508)
      You could also use them while exploring ancient Chozo ruins.

  • Article Tesx (Score:4, Funny)

    by MyLongNickName (822545) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:16AM (#20494855) Journal
    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 you watch ASCII Star Wars through the ASCII goggles?
    • 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.
  • 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 ;)

  • Poor russians (Score:5, Funny)

    by packetmon (977047) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:19AM (#20494887) Homepage
    They don't have an ASCII representation of a /. effect. So I made one for em:

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

  • Stereo (Score:2, Interesting)

    by badfringe (1123899)
    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.

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

      --Rob

  • 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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrXym (126579) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:35AM (#20495137)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by CaffeineAddict2001 (518485) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:54AM (#20495359)
    Almost an hour has passed and not one person has claimed to have a screenshot and posted an ASCII goatse.

  • No computer or OS? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dan East (318230) on Thursday September 06 2007, @11:58AM (#20495433) Homepage Journal
    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

  • 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>

  • 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. :)

  • Quake 3 overlay (Score:3, Funny)

    by IckySplat (218140) on Thursday September 06 2007, @12:06PM (#20495553)
    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 (Score:2, Informative)

    by danEger (471716)
    http://ascii.dyne.org/ [dyne.org]

  • Copy on YouTube, which is not yet Slashdotted (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gulik (179693) on Thursday September 06 2007, @12:23PM (#20495755)
    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.
  • is blonde, brunette, redhead ;)
  • 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.

Make it myself? But I'm a physical organic chemist!