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Ascii Street View

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the rundown

Ascii Street View was actually the juxtaposition of another project. The goal of that project was to liberate an iconic digital artform from behind the screen glass, in this case ASCII Art, and have it exist in a physical space. This resulted in an installation where an artist could paint projection mapped ASCII brush strokes on a physical canvas. Once we completed that project, it was natural to try the opposite - viewing physical space through the lens of purely digital artform. There is no better online representation of the physical world than Google Street View. It was a perfect fit.

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The Building Blocks

Real-time image to text conversion techniques typically execute through software renderers. This limits the speed in which a scene can be drawn and can result in poor frame rates. Until recently, it was not possible to utilize the graphics card in browsers - a necessary step to improving performance. WebGL and three.js provided us with the perfect opportunity to port the shaders we had written for our painting project. With those powerful tools, site construction was relatively painless and fast.

The Votes

The Details

Agency
Marketing Objective
Launch Date
July 30, 2012

The Team

  • Teehan + Lax www.teehanlax.com
  • Peter Nitsch, Director of Labs
  • Derek Kinsman, Creative Technologist
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The Stats

  • 40 total cups of coffee drunk
  • 10 total hours of missed sleep
  • 2 team members working on this project

The Results

The site was picked up by most major technology and digital art publications, gained heavy traffic, and even resulted in a client win. By far, the most common response to visiting the site is "I'm in The Matrix". To us, that's the most significant sign that we hit our goal.

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