▼ About this tool
Point your webcam at the world and watch it redraw itself out of text characters in real time. The ASCII camera reads each frame from your video feed, converts brightness into a grid of glyphs, and refreshes the scene many times a second — so your face, your room and everything moving in front of the lens becomes live, animated ASCII art.
It is a genuine live effect, not a still capture. Tweak the controls while the feed is running: change the resolution for a crisp or blocky look, swap the character ramp, invert light and dark, and switch between full color sampled from the camera or a pure terminal-green matrix vibe. It is great for streaming overlays, retro video calls, glitchy profile clips or just messing about. Everything is computed on your own device — the camera stream stays in your browser and is never sent anywhere.
Freeze a PNG snapshot of any frame, or record the moving ASCII and export it as a GIF or video to share. No install, no account, completely free.
Allow camera access and the tool reads each video frame, maps brightness to text characters and redraws the scene as ASCII many times a second, so your live feed appears as moving text art.
Yes. All processing happens locally in your browser. Your camera feed is never uploaded or recorded to a server, and stops the moment you close or leave the page.
Yes. Take a PNG snapshot of the current frame, or record the animated ASCII feed and export it as a GIF or video clip.
No. The ASCII camera runs in any modern browser with a webcam. There is no app, plugin or sign-up, and it is completely free.