Universe
In any digital video frame, each pixel is comprised of light values. What if you could recompile your image as characters instead of dots?
Think of how The Matrix portrayed AI-generated reality as symbol cascades, with objects defined through the differentiation of brightness values (e.g., solid objects were bright, empty space was dark). Universe now offers its own spin on this concept with Symbol Mapper.
Symbol Mapper rebuilds your footage using numbers, letters, and other symbols. Symbol Mapper maps symbols and characters based on the brightness of the source image in that location. If that sounds confusing, hang in there. We’ll show you how to turn a few key Symbol Mapper concepts into some dazzling image effects.
In the race car scene above, much of the image’s bottom half is dark, often black, and the sky is essentially white. Again, this scene is only comprised of characters. However, study this single frame:
With a black background the symbol that would yield the least possible light would be a small dot — a period. Thus, if you want a black area but every space must have some symbol in it, you'd want very dark periods in that area.
However, you’ll notice there are no dots in the lower-right quadrant. That’s because we restricted our symbol palette to only upper- and lower-case letters while excluding typographic symbols. The brightness of the underlying image maps to the brightness of the characters and (optionally) helps inform which characters are selected for that brightness level. We also used a glow effect to help “fill in” some of the darkness around character edges with glow, thus accentuating the brightness in lighter areas.
As you’ll see in the following feature descriptions, you can also play with row and column densities, specific color ranges, opacity levels, and more. Additionally, Symbol Mapper can interplay with other Universe effects for an even greater range of spectacular results. Click below to dig into the specifics.
Symbol Mapper is even better when used in conjunction with other Universe tools. Watch the following two-minute video to see what happens when we combine Symbol Mapper with Universe Turbulence Noise and ChromaTown.