On April 1 Youtube added a new mode called TEXTp – where their videos could be viewed as ASCII-art.
I really loved that feature, and was very disappointed when they removed it the next day, but ever since then I have been researching about ASCII art generation in flash.

To achieve the ASCII-effect they used the Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit – a tool for programming your own custom filters, which can then be imported into Flash, Photoshop or After Effects. Googling the subject seems to prove me right about this.

Pixel Bender is free, and it is very powerful since it performs image calculations way faster than runtime actionscript is capable of (reading and writing pixels in a bitmapdata object is pretty slow). However I find that it’s a bit hard to get started since I didn’t find any really good Pixel Bender tutorials out there.
If you are looking for a good place to start learning Pixel Bender I highly recommend chapter 9 in Keith Peters book Advanced Actionscript Animation (I love all his books).

Now there are also a few limitations when writing a Pixel Bender filter for flash. You cannot use loops and you cannot define your own functions. However, there are still ways to achieve some really cool stuff!

So, after learning the basics of Pixel Bender, we’ll need to start researching about how to generate ASCII art from a picture. This – together with the “limits” mentioned above – is where the real challenge lies!

I have been able to pull off some cool workarounds this far, and as soon as I have something to show I will post about it here. I will probably write a short tutorial about it if it turns out nice.
Get ready for more posts on the subject!