Virtual Talking (Ouija) Board

It’s starting to become one of the most popular posts on my entire blog and I’m frankly surprised (and a bit embarrassed). A while ago, I created a set of three talking boards available for download and I’m not sure if it was the ease it could be found on the internet, the fact the design was as simple as possible or whether it came with no license strings attached, but they were the most downloaded images and “printable ouija board” was routinely the top search hit for the past year or so.

Well, not that I want to encourage this sort of thing, but I have been getting a few email requests to make a virtual version of the talking board. When they say, “virtual” apparently there’s a demand to get rid of ideo motor responses and confirmation bias. Well, I can help with the first, but the latter is impossible for me to fix since that’s completely in the domain of the end user and, let’s face it, if you’re using a talking board, you sorta have to believe in them to begin with.

So today, I created a virtual talking board with a bit of a twist. It’s basically a simple script that randomly selects coordinates within a board image (the “minimal” version from the ones linked above) and moves the planchette there. This happens every second and if it lands on a character or word, it gets added to a textbox below.

Pick your gibberish

Of course, this method is ripe for confirmation bias since any random set of characters will jump out at anyone desperate to find a pattern, but I’ll leave that to the user’s discretion.

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