Type · Study 096
ASCII Plasma
A flowing plasma effect rendered entirely in text: ten characters from blank to @ stand in for ten levels of brightness.
What you're looking at
Four sine waves of different orientations are added at each character cell, one of them circular and centred on the pointer. The sum is mapped onto a ramp of characters ordered by how much ink they contain: space, full stop, colon, dash, equals, plus, asterisk, hash, percent, at. The brightest cells are drawn in a second colour.
The idea behind it
The plasma is a classic of the 1990s demoscene, popular because a table of sines produced rich motion on slow machines. Drawing images with characters is older still: typists made pictures on typewriters in the 1800s, and early printers with no graphics mode did the same out of necessity.
Try this
Move the pointer to drag the centre of the circular wave around the field.
