(April Fools!) Introducing support for legacy mobile hardware and slow connections

Headsup: This is the April Fools’ joke that we had planned for today. Given the circumstances, we don’t want to run any pranks on you. However, our team loved putting this one together and it’s our sincere hope that we can put a smile on your face to lighten your day a little. Stay safe!

We’re proud to announce a major update of our viewer that makes 3D accessible to users of legacy mobile devices as well as users on slow internet connections. Our new ASCII-based rendering engine runs on all available hardware and requires up to 95% less data transfer.

Psychological studies have shown that the human brain is able to ‘reconstruct’ a 3D model with a high degree of accuracy after an adjustment period of about 30 seconds. You can experience this effect for yourself through our Desktop support for ASCII – focus on the center of the model below for 30 seconds and you will see HD details emerge:

On Desktop, ASCII mode will be automatically enabled for slow connections. You can also manually activate it through the viewer menu on any Sketchfab model:

Tip: this ASCII mode button will show on all model pages only on April 1, 2020. If you don’t see it, reloading your browser page should fix it. Alternatively, you can add ?post_process_ascii=1 to the model URL. This may stop working later without warning.

Accessing Sketchfab on legacy devices depends on brand and model but in general, look for the WAP browser in your menu.

For the Nokia 3310:

Select Menu > 0 > Surf.
Enter ‘sketchfab.com’, and select OK.
Browse the category models or use the search function to access a model.
Navigate the 3D model using the numeric keys (2/8 for up/down, 4/6 for left/right).

The new mode is now available on all 3D models, making Sketchfab the largest repository of 3D ASCII art on the planet. ASCII mode is available on all plans, including the free Basic plan.

(Featuring Nokia 3310 Retro Electronics Challenge by shaderbytes.)

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