The device, evocatively dubbed Clack-Clack FACE, sounds more like something aching to be paired with an obscenity and shouted-on-the-rooftop during a gangsta-rap music video, than a project debuting at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show.
Spun out of the creative minds of recent graduates Quingyuan Chen, Jinyu Fu and Amanda Gelb, Clack-Clack FACE repurposes antiquated technology by wiring each key of a 1961 Royal Empress typewriter to an Arduino, then paring the whole thing to a webcam, projector, and laser printer. The end result is an ASCII portrait painted in real-time.
ASCII is the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a character scheme for encoding English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number ranging from 0 to 127.
How does it work?
After users input a series of keystrokes, the proprietary program converts said keystrokes into the corresponding ASCII symbol and automatically duplicates them to recreate an entire picture. However, the face aspect of the process is reliant on a webcam mounted atop the typewriter case, which maps the person’s silhouette using brightness level comparisons, almost like a 2D electron microscope working in reverse. The darker areas are then filled with the ASCII characters and the resulting portrait is projected onto a paper inserted into the typewriter. Once you’re satisfied with the result, pressing a re-labeled print key activates a nearby laser printer to produce your masterpiece.
Image-to-ASCII conversion is nothing new or original; there are plenty apps and webpages that accomplish the same thing. Yet, what makes Clack-Clack FACE so satisfying is the real-time footage that’s screen capped and converted before your very eyes, all while delivering the glorious tactile feedback of pressing down on those weighty typewriter keys.
Story via psfk
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