From TEXTp comes AsciiMii
On April 1st, 2010 YouTube pulled what I considered to be the greatest Tech Industry prank of the day: TEXTp. For the fools, YouTube claimed that using this video quality mode saved bandwidth; an obvious ruse. In reality it was simply a pixel shader that was applied to the video stream that turned streamed video frames into the ASCII style that we all know and love. I love ASCII art, so I thought this was the coolest thing I’d seen in a long while. I had hoped that YouTube would realize just how awesome this effect truely is and leave it available year round, but my hopes were in vain. At midnight on April 2nd, the effect was gone. You couldn’t even append the &textp=fool parameter into the querystring. Lucky me I had Firefox save me a page on my disk that still had all the proper flashvars to keep using the effect. But sometime on April 5th, YouTube removed the pixel bender shader they were using for the effect from public access. TEXTp was no more as far as YouTube was concerned.
Long story short, I was mad that they removed something so awesome, so I created my own TEXTp pixel shader to cope. I call it AsciiMii. Here we have optimus prime demonstrating the effect:
The shader is written in Adobe’s Pixel Bender framework. There’s still a few things that need tweaking, but I’m going to see how far I can run with this. I’ve already got it attachable to video objects in flash, and since its a Pixel Bender kernel, I can probably turn it into a Photoshop filter. I’ll post more when I actually figure out what I’m going to do with this. At the very least, I’ll just release the shader (sorry… I should really be calling it a “kernel”) source code and be done with it.