Where these effects came from
Camera Funhouse did not start here. Our sister site, the ASCII Art Archive, has a tool that turns a live webcam feed into text characters – and building that meant writing a great deal of image processing with nothing to do with ASCII: mirrors, lens distortions, color transforms, warps. That engine is what Camera Funhouse runs on today, minus the last step, the one that throws the pixels away and prints letters instead.
The two do genuinely different things with the same machinery, so if the idea appeals, the original is worth a look.
From our sister site
asciiart.eu
- Webcam to ASCII Art – your camera, live, redrawn as text characters. The tool Camera Funhouse grew out of.
- Image to ASCII Art – the same idea applied to a picture instead of a live feed.