Author here, yes you're correct. The name is a bit of misnomer, and to do it truly with ASCII I'd have to move data back to the CPU which had pretty bad performance. I took a bit of artistic liberty and decided to draw my own ASCII-esque glyphs using signed distance functions. I'm considering adding a setting to swap the modes so that it does use true ASCII but again it'd be pretty rough performance on large screens.
Author here, you're mostly right in that it's a show piece. However, it uses no external libraries, I built it all myself using VanillaJS. I do use some famous noise algorithms, specifically Simplex noise and a method of domain warping.
It's a fun experiment into WebGL and graphics programming. I intended it to be a cool tool for getting inspiration for designing and creating other art in general. I do eventually want to build this out into a larger set of tools that would allow you to quickly iterate and build out various aesthetics for designing.
In it's current state, it's mostly practical for creating pretty images and videos that you could use in other projects. If there's more interest I could possibly turn it into more, would love to hear ideas and suggestions!
Author here. This is all done on the GPU using shaders. It's a few layers, and you can find the details over on my Bluesky post, feel free to read it there. I've been thinking about making a blog post covering how I went about building it.
