I remember it was mind-blowing being able to launch quake inside your terminal, but that was over 20 years ago.
The tech is basically scaling the image down to the size of the terminal and using LUT to get a character from pixel's luminosity.
The hardest part of this particular demo is, in fact, rendering font in WebGL. Rest is rather trivial and while interesting and pretty I don't really think it deserves first page on HN.
I think it might be better with one of the old character sets that had multiple blocks per pixel. That would increase the resolution and they could use Floyd-Steinberg dithering or similar to get grayscale. OTOH that wouldn't be ASCII.
I remember it was mind-blowing being able to launch quake inside your terminal, but that was over 20 years ago. The tech is basically scaling the image down to the size of the terminal and using LUT to get a character from pixel's luminosity. The hardest part of this particular demo is, in fact, rendering font in WebGL. Rest is rather trivial and while interesting and pretty I don't really think it deserves first page on HN.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAlib