Crystal Ball

A crystal ball, also known as an orbuculum or crystal sphere, is a crystal or glass ball and common fortune-telling object. It is generally associated with the performance of clairvoyance and scrying in particular. A crystal ball, also known as an orbuculum or crystal sphere, is a crystal or glass ball and common fortune-telling object. It is generally associated with the performance of clairvoyance and scrying in particular. In the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder describes use of crystal balls by soothsayers ('crystallum orbis', later written in Medieval Latin by scribes as orbuculum). By the 5th century AD, scrying was widespread within the Roman Empire and was condemned by the early medieval Christian Church as heretical. Dr. John Dee was a noted British mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy, of which the use of crystal balls was often included. Crystal gazing was a popular pastime in the Victorian era, and was claimed to work best when the Sun is at its northernmost declination. Immediately before the appearance of a vision, the ball was said to mist up from within. The art or process of 'seeing' is known as 'scrying', whereby images are claimed to be seen in crystals, or other media such as water, and are interpreted as meaningful information. The 'information' gleaned then is used to make important decisions in one's life (i.e. love, marriage, finances, travel, business, etc.). When the technique of scrying is used with crystals, or any transparent body, it is known as crystallomancy or crystal gazing. Crystal balls are popular props used in mentalism acts by stage magicians. Such routines, in which the performer answers audience questions by means of various ruses, are known as crystal gazing acts. One of the most famous performers of the 20th century, Claude Alexander, was often billed as 'Alexander the Crystal Seer'. In 2016, Google released an assistant application called Google Assistant. In the application, there is a game called Crystal Ball on which the game will randomise answers to yes-or-no questions. The following countries: United Kingdom, United States and Australia have high quality voice samples that a real human recorded in a soft spoken voice to make it sound like a crystal ball. In April 2019 after a software update, the speech API started to malfunction and the original studio voices were replaced with the standard text to speech voices. These were restored a few weeks later. A crystal ball is essentially a bi-convex spherical lens with a uniform radius of curvature, although without its edges and center material truncated as in a conventional lens construction. Thus the principles of optics may be applied to analyze its imaging characteristics.