Realtime messaging from beyond the grave

In celebration of Halloween, the Ably team developed Ouijably, a digital recreation of a spirit board, leveraging the Ably peer-to-peer game framework to enable users to seemingly communicate with spirits online. This web application simulates the traditional Ouija board experience by utilizing the ideomotor phenomenon, where participants subconsciously move a planchette to spell out messages. The app, built with HTML, CSS, and TypeScript, uses realtime messaging to synchronize mouse or gyroscopic movements across users, allowing the planchette to move on a digital board and reveal letters through collision detection with SVG polygons. The Ouijably code is open-source and available on GitHub, requiring an Ably account and other technical tools for setup, and it is designed to emulate the intriguing experience of a physical spirit board in a digital format.