nowfound

Life & fun · March 4, 2023

AH

Asciify, high-performance animated text art

Converts images, videos, and 3D renders into ASCII art.

Asciify, high-performance animated text art launched on March 4, 2023 with 6 votes, #2,215 of 5,007 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

Visit asciify.sister.software ↗Alternatives

What it does

Converts images, videos, and 3D renders into rasterized ASCII art. Asciify draws character sprites onto a canvas rather than emitting text nodes, so a full frame costs one WebGL draw call: around 0.3 ms at 4K, with no per-character work on the CPU. Where WebGL2 is missing it falls back to a Canvas2D rasterizer automatically, and a separate terminal renderer rasterizes to ANSI escapes for Node. Zero dependencies; the browser renderers are about 8 kB gzipped and the terminal renderer about 3 kB. Anything that reaches a canvas can be asciified: images, video frames, WebGL scenes, or raw RGBA buffers. Character sets, fonts, contrast, and color are all configurable. The API is documented inline;…from asciify.sister.software

Does a similar job

all alternatives →
  • CP
    Choose Photo. Make Ascii2012 · dchang.mit.edu · ▲116
  • IB
    I built a tool convert any image to ASCII Art2022 · asciiart.pankajtanwar.in · ▲15
  • ASCIImator2015 · ▲79

    A simple photo app that converts images into ASCII art

  • ASCII Art Generator2025 · ascii-images.com · ▲12

    Transform your images into beautiful ASCII art with our tool

  • turn videos into ASCII art (open source, js+canvas)2024 · collidingscopes.github.io · ▲121

    This tool turns videos into ASCII pixel art. You can use your webcam feed or upload a video, then use the controls to adjust the colors, resolution, text style, etc. Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/ascii It's built with javascript / html canvas. I'll be continuing to work on this, with the goal of improving performance (it can be laggy at high resolutions) and to also allow image input (turn an image into animated ASCII art). Please let me know of any feedback or suggestions!

  • An ASCII 3D Rendering EngineJun 2026 · glyphcss.com · ▲211

    Render 3D models (OBJ, glTF, GLB, STL, .vox) as ASCII art — in the browser, in React or Vue, or straight in your terminal. A three.js-style API with no WebGL and no canvas: just text in a single <pre>.

More life & fun this month

the category →

Source: Show HN post ↗

Launched alongside, March 2023

the whole month →
  • GPT-4▲1,160

    More accurate, less cringe, smoother & useful daily chats!

    AI · 2023 · openai.com

  • Collato▲972

    One AI search to find anything instantly, across all apps

    AI · 2023

  • Typing Mind▲826

    Chat with AI using your API keys. Pay only for what you use. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other LLMs supported. The best chat LLM frontend UI for all AI models.

    AI · 2023 · typingmind.com

  • Arc for iOS▲825

    Meet the internet again

    Work · 2023 · apps.apple.com

  • Sequoia▲726

    Personalized men's sexual health with on-demand experts

    Life & fun · 2023 · sequoia.health

  • BI
    BBC “In Our Time”, categorised by Dewey Decimal, heavy lifting by GPT▲688

    I'm a big fan of the BBC podcast In Our Time -- and (like most people) I've been playing with the OpenAI APIs. In Our Time has almost 1,000 episodes on everything from Cleopatra to the evolution of teeth to plasma physics, all still available, so it's my starting point to learn about most topics. But it's not well organised. So here are the episodes sorted by library code. It's fun to explore. Web scraping is usually pretty tedious, but I found that I could send the minimised HTML to GPT-3 and get (almost) perfect JSON back: the prompt includes the Typescript definition. At the same time I…

    AI · 2023 · genmon.github.io