Have you ever been out and about and needed to make a check against INT, WIS or CON but not had a die handy? Sure, you could use an app on your phone, but who knows what pseudorandom nonsense that’s getting up to. [Lazy Hovercraft] has got the solution with his new site RealDice.org, which, well, rolls real dice.
Well, one die, anyway. The webpage presents a button to roll a single twenty-sided die, or “Dee-Twenty” as the cool kids are calling it these days. The rolling is provided by a unit purchased from Amazon that spins the die inside a plastic bubble, similar to this unit we covered back in 2020. (Alas for fans of the venerable game Trouble, it does not pop.) The die spinner’s button has been replaced by a relay, which is triggered from the server whenever a user hits the “roll” button.
You currently have to look at the camera feed with your own eyes to learn what number was rolled, but [Lazy Hovercraft] assures us that titanic effort will be automated once he trains up the CVE database. To that end you are encouraged to help build the dataset by punching in what number is shown on the die.
This is a fun little hack to get some physical randomness, and would be great for the sort of chatroom tabletop gaming that’s so common these days. It may also become the new way we select the What’s That Sound? winners on the Hackaday Podcast.
Before sitting down for a game session, you might want to make sure you’re all using fair dice. No matter how fair the dice, its hard to beat quantum phenomena for random noise.
Wait, I don’t need to pay an OnlyFans model to do this for me any more!?
Ah, a six-toy.
Right but you could still do that if you want, those hardworking people need money as well.
I knew an AI / machine learning professor who would ask his students to flip a coin 100 times (or something, more than most students would be willing to do). He’d then “prove” who “cheated” by running an entropy test on the submissions.
But now, well this is worse than chatgpt.
I use an app called Randomizers which lets you choose between coins, dice, playing cards, etc., made by the folks at random.org.
I love it! Real “earliest days of the Web” vibes from this one; what next, a webcam pointed at a coffee machine? :)
Error 418: Coffee not found.
I’m a teapot.
Watch someone playing Bubble Craps online.
Soon going online will be the only way to die. Will prob require a subscription too…
The future is here folks.
I don’t suppose anybody remembers that there are relatively simple and robust non-AI methods for reading a camera image of a die?
No, nobody knows about OpenCV because it never existed.
Would be cool to collect statistics from all the rolls and build a distribution graph.