ASCII Webcam Terminal is a fun Python project that turns your webcam feed into live ASCII art directly in your terminal. It uses OpenCV to read the camera and prints the video feed in green characters for a hacker-style effect.
⚠️ Early Release / Experimental
This is a small experiment. High-resolution cameras may lag, and the output may look squished if your terminal isn’t adjusted.
- Live Webcam Feed – Your webcam video shown as ASCII art.
- Green Terminal Display – Classic hacker-style green text.
- Grayscale Conversion – Converts frames to grayscale for faster processing.
- Configurable Frame Skipping – Skip frames to reduce lag.
- Optional Mirror Mode – Flip your camera horizontally like a normal webcam.
- Make sure you have Python installed, along with OpenCV.
- Run the Python script in your terminal.
- Adjust your terminal size to be very small (like 80 columns wide) so the ASCII webcam fits fully and looks clear.
- Press Ctrl+C to exit.
No installation is required beyond the Python dependencies, and everything runs locally.
Want to make it better? Contributions are welcome!
- Add support for higher resolutions or color ASCII.
- Improve performance by optimizing loops.
- Experiment with overlays, like spinning 3D shapes on top of the webcam.
- Resizable terminal output
- More ASCII character sets
- Spinning 3D donuts, cubes, or other animations on top of live feed
- Customizable colors
MIT License – feel free to use, modify, and experiment with the ASCII webcam project.
- OpenCV: https://opencv.org