SATURN V ASCII LAUNCH

01 // FULL VIDEO

Shape-aware ASCII rendering of the Apollo 11 liftoff applied to every frame of NASA's Saturn V launch footage (public domain). Streamed in 2MB chunks so playback starts immediately. Try the interactive terminal on the homepage for the fastfetch splash demo.

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READY

02 // HOW IT WORKS

Based on the shape-vector technique from Alex Harri's "Rendering ASCII Art".

1. SHAPE SAMPLING

s1 s2 s3 s4 s5 s6 CHARACTER CELL

Each cell in the source image is divided into 6 circular sampling regions (Harri, 2024). The average brightness within each circle becomes one component of a 6-dimensional shape vector:

[s1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6]

This captures where light and dark areas fall within the cell, not just overall brightness.

2. CHARACTER MATCHING

IMAGE CELL SHAPE VECTOR [.4 .1 .6 .3 .1 .5] min dist COMPARE TO ALL ASCII CHARS: / [.5 .0 .5 .5 .0 .5] d=0.42 \ [.0 .4 .3 .4 .5 .1] d=0.12 | [.5 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5] d=0.68 _ [.0 .0 .0 .0 .9 .9] d=0.91 BEST MATCH: \

Every printable ASCII character (32-126) is pre-rendered to a bitmap and encoded as the same 6D vector. The character whose vector is nearest (Euclidean distance) to the image cell's vector is selected (Harri, 2024).

Contrast enhancement using directional neighbor comparison sharpens edges before matching.

3. ANIMATION PIPELINE

SCROLL 19 frames ease-in t^2 HOLD 3 frames flame flicker DISSIPATE 21 frames wave fade viewport rises like liftoff RGB + char perturbation top-down sweep chars -> smoke

Scroll: The viewport scrolls upward through the full-height ASCII image with quadratic ease-in, simulating launch acceleration.

Hold + Flicker: At the bottom of the image, flame-masked cells get randomized character substitution and RGB jitter each frame.

Dissipation: A wave front sweeps top-to-bottom, fading characters through smoke glyphs (. , ` ') to clear, while dimming RGB to black.

Full technical writeup of the shape-vector methodology: alexharri.com/blog/ascii-rendering