Jim asked how it was done, so in the spirit of sharing DIY tricks, here’s the basic steps I followed to make the TRON ASCII video.
Basically, it was tying together two separate programs, in a GUI pipe.
I grabbed the .mp4 video file from YouTube, to use as the source.
The hard work of rendering the video as ASCII art was done by the command line movie player `ASCIIMoviePlayer`. That program was a technology demo by Apple at one of the WWDCs I went to (a long time ago), and it works great. It’s been updated as the open source QuickASCII project, which is cross platform. It has some nice features added, including scaling and support for colour. Seriously. Coloured ASCII art, rendered in real time from any video file. Insane. It seems to work on any Quicktime-capable format - here’s the output of the Reverend Devilhorns animated GIF, as ASCII:
I always thought TRON (1982) would have been cooler if rendered in ASCII, since that’s what terminals of the era could do. With that, I bring you the light cycle race from TRON, processed as ASCII art:
I rewatched the original the other day. Holy crap, were glasses big in 1982.
>Of course, the same society now said to be undergoing a computer revolution has long since gotten used to “revolutions” in laundry detergents, underarm deodorants, floor waxes, and other consumer products. Exhausted in Madison Avenue advertising slogans, the image had lost much of its punch.
>“Appropriate technologists were unwilling to face squarely the facts of organized social and political power. Fascinated by dreams of a spontaneous, grass-roots revolution, they avoided any deep-seeking analysis of the institutions that control the direction of technological and economic development. In this happy self-confidence they did not bother to devise strategies that might have helped them overcome obvious sources of resistance. The same judgement that Marx and Engels passed on the utopians of the nineteenth century apply just as well to the appropriate technologists of the 1970s: they were lovely visionaries, naive about the forces that contained them.”
Pulls current data from Calgary Transit to list the next several buses at a given stop. Much better than having to rely on snapshots of schedules stored as notes (or printed/scrawled on slips of paper) or with flaky and cluttered web interfaces.
