BTW, if you hate the gallery format as much as the Grinch hated Christmas, click here.

Remote Fetch: Ball chasing is very good exercise for pooches, even if it can cause obsession and anti social tendencies that will result in thousands of dollars in dog therapy. Capable of being remote triggered at 7 or 15 second intervals, or just automatically throwing balls your dog drops in the bucket, it might be worth the trouble. Think of it as the equivalent of a video game for a dog. And it's better than a doggie treadmill, which you can't really leave a dog unsupervised on for very long. $120 [Remote Fetch]

Hotdoll:Ugh! Someone actually went and turned the hotdoll dog sex doll concept into an actual product. The doll has a silicon...nevermind. We had one at Gizmodo Gallery and one owner brought one in to see if their dog—that loves humping—would hump it. He did not. I guess just like real people, it takes a flexible sexual orientation to find comfort in inanimate figurines. Price TBD [Hotdoll on Giz]

Indiana Jones and Star Wars Dog Costumes: Remember when Indiana Jones shot that guy with the swords in Temple of Doom? What if, no, listen, wait, what if Harrison Ford was a dog and in that scene and, instead of shooting the assassin, he used teeth! And, like in Star Wars, instead of light sabers, they had swords made of bones. Oh man, hilarious! Earnestly, these costumes are the only items on this list you should legitimately buy for your dogs. Roughly $14 each. [SpoiledRottenDoggies]

Autofetch Motion Pet Ball: It looks like the famous Super Happy Fun Ball* from Saturday Night Live sketches in the 90s, and although not radioactive, the Autofetch ball acts freakishly similar. The motorized dog toy takes a cookie and then spins around, wildly, til batteries go out, or your dog goes insane and crushes the life out of it. Recommended! *Do not taunt! $27 for two. [Autofetch]

Bissell SpotBot Pet: Puppy training is basically like potty training a kid, except your whole apartment is the diaper. Here we have a steam cleaner that sprays cleaning solution to the mess on your carpet, a rotating brush that scrubs while the vacuuming action drinks—sorry, that may have not been the best choice of word—up the dirty water, storing it in a reservoir for disposal later. Basically, it's an automatic poop/vomit/pee cleaner. I'm surprised they don't make one for frat boys. $140 [Bissell]
Catgenie: Look, I know I said this whole list is a bunch of things you shouldn't buy, but this is the one you should especially not buy: CatGenie is basically an automatic literbox that takes 45 minute to cycle out the poop. Until humans engineer smarter pets that can be potty trained, there is no tech that can avoid domestic animal excrement handling. $329 [Catgenie review]

Sleepypod Air: This is a travel bag for little animals. What makes it different from other bags is that it has special deceptive fold-in panels that squash your animal while going through security checkpoints, so no one can tell you your bag is too big. (Don't worry, I don't think it'll kill your cat.) Then, after you board, it expands a few inches but fits under a chair. It also has a slot for slipping through a rolling luggage handle, so the bag can rest on top, and has seatbelt clips for placing it in car seats. $150 [Sleepypod Air]

The Hydroglass: For those who believe fish are pets, even though you can't hug them, I'd find it hard to believe you could do better than this fish tank, which has a seven-head horizontal shower on top. $14,500 [Hydroglass]

Don't forget to recommend your own favorite pet gifts in comments-include pics and pricing if possible.

All Giz Wants is our annual round-up of favorite gift ideas, including amazing attainable objects and a few far-out fantasies. We'll be popping guides catered to different interests several times per day for the next week, so keep checking back.

Given the oft-hilarious Russian inventors, their equally staid and awkward American partner and the fact that this is on Vice Magazine's video site, a part of me thinks this might be a joke, but it actually looks like they've gotten the thing to work. It's essentially one of those giant American Gladiator balls, but placed on a stand equipped with wheels, so whoever's inside can run in any direction. The users are equipped with goggles and what looks like a plastic laser gun for the first-person shooter demo, and the game picks up movement pretty nicely. We imagine it'd be tougher than they think to change direction on a dime, and of course not that many people have room for a 10-foot metal ball in their family room, but it's worth a look. Best line: "It really is a locomotion simulator. And just to define locomotion, it doesn't have anything to do with trains [dude does his best to hold back a vigorous guffaw at this pun] but with the movement of people." [VBS.tv]

The downside is that it's $20. This would be great if you could somehow load your own MP3s on there and play it back, but it is pretty cool. As is, it'll only be a few baths before you get tired of the song and wonder why there's a pink think floating in your water. [Sega Toys via Crunchgear]

The game in the video above requires each player to try to hit a projected target on the court with the Bouncing Star. As a player picks up the ball and begins to throw it on the court, the accelerometer in the ball acknowledges motion and transforms the ball's color. Using infrared, the ball can interact with the digital court; when the ball touches down or races by, the court can display a motion graphic or some other cool visual reaction.

Because of the low light in the video above, the intensity of the ball's interaction with the display was not well documented, but the idea of a ball wirelessly interacting with a digital court is pure genius. If the same principles of this Bouncing Star could be integrated into all sports using balls, we would have some amazing games to play and to watch. In Tron, the crazy Frisbee game was just a program inside of a computer, but this Tron-like tech—designed by engineers at Japan's University of Electro-Communications—could soon happen in real life. You hearing this, Nintendo? [Bouncing Star at SIGGRAPH]

The guy in the video keeps asking whether it's an earthquake, in case you were wondering.

Deputy Dog dug up this clip, which I then found via DVICE. It reminded me of my own visit to the Taipei 101 last year (see my photos in the gallery above). The ginormous ball, of which the Burj Dubai has nine, was installed on in-place from 41 discrete steel plates because the combined weight of 730 tons would have been too heavy to lift by crane. The people even came up with a nickname for it: the Damper Baby. Don't look at me. The best I could come up with is some combination of "stabilizer" and "testicle".

The architects were forced to install it because of high winds and the fact that the Taipei 101 is only 600 feet from a fault line. In order to get up to the observation floor where you can see the top of the ball, you have to ride in the world's fastest elevator. I actually might have my own video of my ride up somewhere, but it's possible that it was deleted shortly after the world's fastest elevator ride turned into the world's stinkiest elevator ride. I had a lot of good food.

One of the commenters on Deputy Dog wondered why there haven't been reports of people climbing over the barrier and trying to sit on it or swing it manually. To which another commenter responded, "perhaps it just says that the Chinese are able to restrain themselves from such boneheaded acts, while too many Brits just go crazy and can’t act with appropriate restraint." No, I don't think it's that, although Brits are pretty nutty. I think it's because nobody wants to be crushed to death by a 730 ton ball. [Deputy Dog via DVice]

[Flickr Credit for lead photo]

See what I mean? If it incorporates some neat face-recognition tech, that would be impressive. But if it's just got a basic accelerometer that simply detects an impact, then you're going to be looking at lots of pictures of walls, floors and sky. Those bracelets are a whacky idea too: wouldn't some sort of recessed button do the trick?

Still, there's something endearing about the idea, and I kinda get the idea that it might snap you looking less "posed" than for normal photos. Purposeless fun, in a toy. It's just a prototype, it seems. [TosPom and ]

[Craigslist]

DIY Ping Pong Gun [Random Good Stuff]

You probably guessed by now that it was from Brando, but it only costs $16, so it makes for quite a cool desk toy. We suppose that it's only fitting that other '70s tech makes it into USB form now, so look forward to USB eight-balls, USB goldfish platform shoes, and USB really, really tight pants from Brando. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Brando]

The other reason is because it looks like something you could stick a bird into and torture it with. No, we're not sadistic. We were sexually abused by a parakeet when we were kids. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Front Gate via Red Ferret via uber gizmo]

Throwing a ball to someone is difficult, but even more difficult is using visual information of a ball in flight to put your hand in the right place within a few hundred milliseconds, and then actually -close- that hand within a few tens of milliseconds.

Thanks Martin!

Great for lonely people and computer geeks—the Venn diagram of which looks like two circles humping. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Overstock via Gearlog]

The balls are launched between 20kph (12.4mph) and 70kph (43mph), which isn't that fast, but is good enough for practice. Seriously, as a guy who's been hit in the nuts more than once by a tennis ball machine (ball me once, shame on you, b..ba....I'm not gonna get balled again), I can say this is a good invention. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Astro-r via Seihin World via BNCRanking (japanese)]

Japan only, but we expect them to find their way into import shops soon enough.

News Release[Elecom]

Specs and pricing on iPod speakers [Amazon]