Dennis [05.02.06 08:02 PM]

I do not mean to belittle the project, and I really find it cool. But, the maps only barely fit in to the realm of ASCII art. The map only uses one ASCII character, and the color of the character is more important then the actual shape or position of the character. In most ASCII art, the use of different characters give shape to what the artist is trying to convey.

  Greg Sadetsky [05.02.06 08:11 PM]

Dennis,

You are right that it is not ASCII art per se - have you, by chance, seen a good image-to-ASCII-line-art algorithm? I would love to have a "True ASCII Art" option on the site.

Thanks

Greg Sadetsky
ASCIIMaps.com Product Manager
Poly9

  Dennis [05.02.06 08:32 PM]

Sorry, I do not have a better solution. It is easier to dish out problems then it is to come up with meaningful solutions. I would imagine that most image to ascii art converters (it looks like wikipedia has about 20 of them) would fail miserably on the satellite images because of the complexity of the images and the near monochromatic color scheme. I wish I could help, but I do not have any real experience in the area.

  Greg Sadetsky [05.02.06 10:12 PM]

Dennis,

I appreciate your comments. We actually stumbled on something that should be (dare I say) fairly easy to run on the server side for road maps. I'll let everybody know when it's up (or should I register asciiartmaps.com right away?) :-)

Greg

P.S. We're definitely staying with the colored 'o's for Sat. Even for road maps, edge detection gives some strange results at certain zoom levels, but when very close or very far, it looks really good.