

Show HN: Choose Photo. Make Ascii - ananddass
http://dchang.mit.edu/artwork/

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ananddass
My friend just learned how to code last week and was already able to make
this. I'm impressed by the quality of codecademy

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alpb
That's actually quite interesting. I wonder, what is the underlying algorithm?
That's amazing for a first-week coder.

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iansinke
There's probably a lot of complicated ways of doing this, but to keep it
simple you could probably just downscale the image, convert to black and
white, and have an array which maps lightness ranges to ascii characters

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brettcvz
Looking at the source, looks like he piped it through <http://secret-
wildwood-1014.herokuapp.com/>, which looks like it does basic image to ascii
conversions when you give it a url. Not sure if he spun that up, but it's cool
in that now the app can be made all in js

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coldskull
what would really be cool is if someone creates a service that can turn videos
into 'ascii art' videos....that would look beautiful...

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jbsilva
Try `mplayer -vo aa <video_file>`

~~~
vhf

      -vo caca <video_file>
    

to have it in color. :)

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sequoia
<http://freecode.com/projects/jp2a> < I use this in the console sometimes.
Nice just to check the orientation of a photo or something, then e.g. rotate
w/convert.

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csl
A friendly note: The official homepage is at <http://csl.sublevel3.org/jp2a/>

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dag11
Oooh, this reminds me of something similar I made when I was 14 or 15. I made
a program to do just this, but only with bitmaps. No Twitter Bootstrap or
filepicker.io, though ;)

Web interface: <http://minipenguin.com/bta/>

Standalone source code: <http://minipenguin.com/bta/bta.c>

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Game_Ender
Cool web-app, if you like this you should try out libcaca[1] it has even been
integrated with mplayer[2].

1 - <http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca>

2 - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP5KvaWz6Dg>

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a3_nm
Or aalib
<[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib>](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib>),
which I my opinion gives better results than libcaca for monochrome images.
You might also enjoy their demo program bb (sudo apt-get install bb).

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spec_laconic
Perl module for such: [http://search.cpan.org/~asavige/Acme-
EyeDrops-1.60/lib/Acme/...](http://search.cpan.org/~asavige/Acme-
EyeDrops-1.60/lib/Acme/EyeDrops.pm)

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l33tbro
A bit of oneupmanship: ASCII projektor, which was an app from a few years ago
that allowed you to create ASCII from video.

<http://earthlingsoft.net/ASCII%20Projektor/>

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sprobertson
Put MIT in URL. Get clicks.

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alpb
Pretty cool. I finally saw a practical use of filepicker.io!

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jpswade
[http://labs.phurix.net/posts/converting-your-logo-to-
ascii-a...](http://labs.phurix.net/posts/converting-your-logo-to-ascii-art)

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crasshopper
<http://www.floodgap.com/software/ppmascii/ppmascii.txt>

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cek
This is fun. I made one of my '88 911:

<http://kindel.com/porsche/Ascii>

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MIT_Hacker
I remember making a python script in high school that did this same thing. If
only FilePicker had existed then!

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jordanthoms
Mplayer has ASCII art output for videos, -vo aa . Can be fun :-)

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girlvinyl
Really fun! Nice implementation of photo to ascii.

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chippy
Does it have an API?

