GlideTV has seen the future and it comes in the shape of an ashtray made out of a halved Magic 8 Ball. Designed for home theatre PCs, Windows PCs, Apple Macs, AppleTV, Sony PlayStation 3, and Boxee (did we leave anyone out?), the GlideTV Navigator aims to make the merge between Internet and living room entertainment.

Billiard humor aside, it does look pretty intriguing. If anything, it’d at the very least make for a snazzy paperweight, but what can this little guy do?

The GlideTV features:

• Clickable touchpad mapped to your TV screen — precise cursor control, one-thumb scrolling, single and double-click selection.
• Backlit AV buttons to control volume and playback.
• Directional buttons for easy two-axis navigation.
• Dedicated Escape, Enter, Back, and Function keys to control applications.
• On-screen keyboard — requires download, Windows only.
• Integrated search menu with links to Google, Amazon Video on Demand, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and more — requires download, Windows only.
• Rechargeable battery.

Not bad, but I haven’t been too keen on this whole onscreen keyboard business in the past. And at $149, I think I’d want a remote that could do a little bit more than search the internet for videos.

Still, A+ for effort. As the tradition of TV watching evolves towards more and more IP, I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of this type of device popping up. It’s only a matter of time until the web is fully integrated into the living room — but how smooth of a transition remains to be seen.