# ASCII particle word

A word made of drifting particles and printed as ASCII glyphs that scatter from the pointer. Live at https://design.how/vault#ascii-field. Watch only: it has no skill to install.

## What it is

The word VAULT fills a pale card, but it is not set in type. It is a crowd of 40,000 points, printed through a grid of ASCII glyphs, so the letters read as dense marks like #, % and the letters V A U L T themselves, thinning to dots and dashes at the edges where fewer points sit. The points never stay still. They wander off the letter shapes on a slow curl-noise current, fray the edges into drifting characters and keep being reborn back at home, so the word is always legible and always moving.

There are three passes. A GPGPU sim in a 200 by 200 half-float texture holds every particle's position and a life value; each step it pushes the particle along a 4D simplex flow field and, when its life runs out, puts it back at its home point, which was sampled from the word drawn on a 2D canvas. The particles are then drawn as additive white points into a buffer at half the card's resolution. Last, an ASCII pass splits that buffer into a grid 100 cells across, reads each cell's brightness and stamps the glyph at that position in a 14-step ramp, from a blank to the letters of the word.

The glyphs are deep indigo ink on the pale page. Moving the pointer pushes particles away with a force that grows with the pointer's speed, and the ASCII pass lights a comet trail of the last 24 pointer positions in pink to violet, each fading over 0.75 seconds. On a touch screen the sim drops to 128 by 128 and the pixel ratio to 1.5.

Last updated: 2026-11-02