New toy. The Ambient Orb. A glass ball with an intelligent LED-based lighting system. The Orb receives data from the old radio pager network and converts it to color to represent value.

I ordered my Orb after hearing about it’s potential from Andy, a brilliant and creative fellow I met during the Multiverse Roadmap meetup last week in Brooklyn. Andy had managed to use his Orb to display data other than how the stock market was doing or what the weather forecast was to be, and inspired me to look at this nifty device for it’s potential beyond such pedestrian things.

The device is about as simple as it can be, and seems solid and well engineered. I had no issues getting it up and running, and presently it displays the weather forecast. If precipitation is predicted (rain or snow,) it pulses in addition to displaying the temperature.

In the future, it will tell me something else, but for now – even the weather is made nifty.