I was scrolling through my usual meme and comedy sites and came across this fake product list of “forbidden toys”. While all of them are home runs, the “Their First Ouija” caught my eye in part because my friends and I have a running joke about Ouija since one of them is violently opposed to them. Naturally I had to send this picture to the group chat but it got me thinking about having some kind of automated Ouija.

In a nutshell, it could be a two part project. The first would be the board itself. In order to keep it realistic it would need to be as thin as possible, but would end up being thicker than the usual Parker Brothers pressboard variety with the reason being that beneath the board would be a thin scaffold of motors and belts. The vertical and horizontals of the frame would intersect at a magnet; when the motors are engaged, the magnet could be moved anywhere between [0,0] and [maxX,maxY].

Of course, the magnet would have a companion embedded in the planchette so as the internal magnet moves, the planchette moves as well. Finally, the Ouija mechanism would need a WiFi or BT receiver that was capable of driving the motors. Ideally, this could be battery powered to sell the illusion.

Next, we need a “head” for the project. This could be probably anything like a laptop or desktop PC, but a more compact solution such as a micro PC would be great to make the whole system portable. This could be hidden out of the way and plugged into the wall, but it would need two things: a microphone, and a local AI.

You can hopefully see where this is going.

As the folks gather ’round in a mystical circle and the Ouija board is placed between them, they can shout out questions which would be heard by the AI header. Responses would be broken out by letter and transmitted to the Ouija board which would drive the motors to move the magnet — and the planchette — to the appropriate location on the board.

Hillarious!

I don’t know how feasible this is since I’m mainly The Idea Guy here. The board might be tricky as it would require motors with fluid movement to pull the magnet around the grid. It would probably be noisy, maybe with some level of vibration, that would shatter the illusion but I think that’s OK as this is a joke item anyway. Being wireless in both signal and power might be tricky, so I’ll leave the logistics to the more engineering-minded folks out here. The transmitter might be doable. I think the tricky part would be to get the software to understand the design of the remote board — the layout of the letters based on exact dimensions of the physical board — so the planchette can land on the appropriate letters. Maybe the worst part would be getting the AI set up. For maximum impact, it would need to understand the task and assume a “voice” that could be selectable by the operator. Choices could include Casper the Friendly Ghost (for the kids!), Cryptic Spirit, and Soul of an Absolutely Unhinged Mass-Murderer. The responses would need to be very brief, briefer than AI is usually designed to provide, so I don’t know if that’s possible or not. Then, each word of each response would need to be spelled out using the motors to control the movement of the magnet.

I would totally buy and use this on the regular. In fact, hilarity would ensue after asking a question and removing my hands from the planchette, watching it skid around the board to the horror of that one friend who refuses to be in the same room as a Ouija board.