Google Street View gets ASCII goggles (pictures)

Wish you could see the world in code like Neo in "The Matrix?"

Take a gander at San Francisco City Hall through ASCII Street View, a Web site that casts colorful combinations of text over standard Google Street View imagery. The unique perspective comes from Peter Nitsch, who works in the labs at Toronto marketing firm Teehan+Lax. He cobbled together image-to-text conversion software that uses a combination of WebGL and 3D JavaScript to create the retro overlay.

Nitsch's fondness for text-based art doesn't simply derive from the early days of the Internet.

"For many of us that have grown up with computers, text-mode art represents something deeper than nostalgia," Nitsch says on the Teehan+Lax labs blog. "It is an art form manifested from technological constraints, inspired by the same hacker ethos that build the early machines used to produce and view it."

When Google announces a new version of Android, the Mountain View, Calif., company puts up a related statue in the front lawn of Building 44. In this photo, several Googlers pose in front of delicious Froyo and Gingerbread fixtures.

Peter Nitsch originally created this ASCII filter for another related project named "Painting with a digital brush," which you can learn more about in the video below.