When BB8 first rolled onto our screens in Star Wars, such technology seemed light years away.
Well now it's a reality.
Not only can you can hold it in the palm of your hand but you control it with your mind.
It’s the stuff of sci-fi and fantasy and is as Jedi as it sounds.
But it’s all real and it's all thanks to UK developer Joshua Carr, who's been brought over to New Zealand by IBM.
He's found a way to connect our brains to technology.
"This idea of being a Jedi and being able to control things with your mind is something that's stuck with me ever since I was a child... As a kid I would stare at cars to see if I could get them to move because I believed maybe the force existed and maybe I could be a Jedi," Carr says.
It works like this: First a headset known as ‘Emotiv Insite’ records a regular thought or memory that evokes a certain emotion or feeling in the user.
"It reads the electric signals in your brain and what we can do is transform raw electric signals into actions."
Each thought is assigned to a specific movement forward, back, left, or right like a kind of techno telekinesis.
Car says he takes someone’s recognition of an action and puts it into the internet using IBM. BB-8 listens to the commands which tell him to move about the place.
He says the practical applications are endless.
"What if we could measure movement for people who haven't got the use of their limbs for example... an obvious example... and then people are like 'OK could I use this to improve my meditation' and it becomes this personal level for every single person I speak to the technology is this idea of improving their life."
Carr already uses his technology to turn on his TV and lights at home using just his mind.
He says the world isn't far off from commercialising what people once considered a silly idea from a boy with a big imagination.
Watch the video.
