Spacetec’s 1991 3D motion controller let you press, twist, and tilt a gray orb to rotate, pan, and zoom a CAD model — six degrees of freedom from a single ball. HP rebranded it, NASA used one to drive the Sojourner rover on Mars, and it kept showing up as a prop in ’90s sci-fi because it already looked like it came from the future.

Looking at it now, it’s beautifully crude — a golf ball on a pedestal with eight buttons and a serial cable. But thirty years from now, someone will almost definitely look at our tools the same way. As such, the Spaceball is a reminder that every generation’s most advanced interface eventually becomes someone else’s Object Love.