Ever wondered what you'd look like if you were just compiled out of letters and/or symbols? Probably not, but now you can find out...
Aditya Ramesh has compiled a Python script that takes in as input an image, and returns a text output that resembles the input image. In other words, it replicates an image with certain characters.
It's called Asciify (based on ASCII, which is abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices) and is available on Github here.
It's really simple to use and has a nice and clear readme file to get you started.
I had a quick play with the following result:
The reason it's so long and narrow is only because of line spacing, characters are generally places right next to each other in a row, but vertically the line spacing means we get a stretched effect.
Next, I might look to overlay this code over live video and see what we get!
All credit for Asciify goes to Aditya Ramesh