Korby and I were chatting the other day, and he mentioned the “Ambient Orb” to me. It looks like a pretty cool wireless toy (well ok, it’s priced a bit above ‘toy’ at $150), but it allows you to set the color and pulse of the orb via a wireless signal.

Now what’s really neat is that the orb can also be plugged into a serial port and has a fairly simple protocol to control the orb’s ‘mood’. Some thoughts if you had it directly plugged into the PC:

• Pulse different colors when someone IM’s you.
  
• Pulse a specific color when ‘important’ email comes in.
  
• Put it in your office window, and have it go ‘red’ when you want to be left alone.
  
• Control it by a web service.
  
• Attach a Windows CE device to it, run the http server and hook in an 802.11b adapter. Control it from a wireless webpage.
  
• etc

Heck, you could even have it glow a different color when a build breaks (check out the Build Break Lava Lamp).

Update: Neil sent me this link, which shows how someone has already set up the orb to show build status