Whether you believe or not, fortune tellers use a range of techniques to predict the future in their craft. Is it special insight? Is it keen observational skills? Or do they tell us what we all would like to hear? Perhaps it is all the above plus unique props such as tarot cards and crystal balls, or novel procedures such as palm reading. A kind of magic and a sense of the unknown surrounds the experience.

Also an enigma, elaborate technologies have the same kind of auras about them. And the less that is understood about a technology, the more magical it seems. As a parody of the fortune teller, a machine could employ some of the same unexplainable devices to predict one's future.

Read: The mystic box gathers information through direct interaction with the participant. To emphasize the unknown, a participant will place her hand blindly inside the device. Using tactile and haptic sensory stimuli, the future is extracted from the participant. Other indicators, such as lighting and sounds also aid in the progress of the process.

Reveal: The mystic box reveals little about how it collects the information, and so it reveals little about its prognostications. An internal light glows with varying intensity and color for each participant. A sound or tone with different degrees of pleasantness is played. This combination of sight and sound is extent of the resolution of the read.

The outcome is subjective depending on how the user responds to the color and sound. The experience seems unique but the message is unclear. The mystic box, for all appearances, seems technologically sophisticated, but makes none of its methods apparent—not unlike the fortune teller.

Andre C. Murnieks
Jayoung Sung
Winter 2004