As you can see, peo­ple seemed to have a good time at the ASCII art show on Saturday. I had a blast, and was really pleased with how my ASCII Photo Booth turned out.

The “booth” was weeks in devel­op­ment, and often took pri­or­ity over my reg­u­lar school work. But I learned a ton about Processing, worked with live video for the first time, and also fig­ured out how to gen­er­ate and print PDFs. Also, although I was half-expecting the appli­ca­tion to crash at some point, it never did. What more could I have asked for?

Here’s what it looked like dur­ing installation:

It was fun watch­ing peo­ple use it for the first time, and I got some usability-related insights that will help me improve future instal­la­tions. But most peo­ple under­stood it right away. You sit down in the chair and see your image trans­lated into ASCII text on the screen. Click the mouse, watch the count­down -- 3… 2… 1… Smile! -- the screen flick­ers for a moment, and a sec­ond later your image emerges on paper from a laser printer. Cool!

Update: Just posted this video of the photo booth in action:

One thing I observed is that the best images were cre­ated by the peo­ple who didn’t rush and took some time to exper­i­ment with the sys­tem. They would lean in closer to the cam­era, then far­ther back, watch­ing the on-screen text regen­er­ate in response to their motion. The final images were sharpest when the sub­jects sat com­pletely still before and dur­ing the expo­sure. That felt appro­pri­ate, given that ASCII is old tech­nol­ogy, orig­i­nat­ing from a time when com­put­ers were much, much slower and unable to process images at all. As with early pho­tog­ra­phy, a clear image in ASCII takes time to develop.

I was happy to see peo­ple walk away with a phys­i­cal arti­fact of the expe­ri­ence, in this case a photo of them­selves or of a friend. I hope that one or two of those dynam­i­cally gen­er­ated, orig­i­nal art­works will end up on a refrig­er­a­tor some­where. (If you had your pic­ture taken, leave a com­ment below and tell me about your experience.)

More pic­tures from the evening below. The gallery sign (excel­lently designed by Colin, who curated the show):

JK’s ASCII video wall: