What is your algorithm for shading here? It seems like brightness is partially provided by the density of the characters (eg, '8' vs '.', as in normal ascii art), but also partially by the color of the characters.
If you keep zooming in eventually the perspective flips. As you keep zooming in more the perspective gets warped and it creates a bizarre fish-eye effect.
I had about as much fun playing around with perspective warping as I did the finding things to look at in ASCII.<p>It's a pretty cool toy!
What a nice way to find out that my rather old Thinkpad (on Debian testing) now has WebGL support - I only updated everything from time to time, and apparently <i>stuff actually started working</i>. Great!<p>Great hack, too. I really, really want that thing as a screensaver!
How is it that this and GSVPano does not violate Google's term of service, since they pull images from Google's undocumented street view API? I have a related project, but am not sure if I can make it public because of this issue. Does Google simply not care?
Very cool! I wrote some quick and dirty code that adds some functionality to the page: <a href="http://pastebin.com/FZGwjJvv" rel="nofollow">http://pastebin.com/FZGwjJvv</a> . It should work if you have a javascript console or greasemonkey or something like that.<p>h - Toggle visibility of the HUD (minimap and information)<p>space - Toggle the rotation on/off<p>- (numpad) - Slow down the rotation (slowing below 0 reverses rotation)<p>+ (numpad) - Speed up the rotation<p>- (main keyboard) - Lower the delta by which the rotation speed is increased/decreased (default delta is 0.005, lowers by 0.0001)<p>= (main keyboard) - Raise the delta by which the rotation speed is increased/decreased (default delta is 0.005, raises by 0.0001)<p>Might I suggest warp speed? ;)
I'm on macbook with nvidia 9400m, only works on Firefox. On Chrome (latest) and Safari, it doesn't show anything. I wonder why WebGL isn't working on these browsers.
From my boy Hakim in May, 2011 - <a href="http://hakim.se/experiments/textify" rel="nofollow">http://hakim.se/experiments/textify</a>
Not sure how the approach differs technically, but obviously a different stylistic feel per the translations.<p>And I'm glad I read the comments and played with the zoom. Drastically changes the effect ... very much like a video-game world with incredible detail.
Are the start locations completely random?<p>I ask because the 3-4 times I opened it, the start location looked absolutely stunning<p>Also: My laptop usually have issues with WebGL sites, they crash or run really slow. This is smooth as can be!.. Great work<p>edit: people are talking about zooming.. How do you zoom?