OrbCharacter

Live

Behavior

• ·still — at rest with its own movement: counter-rotating swirls and a gentle breathe. Present, not demanding.
• ·listening — digesting what the user said: swirls quiet down and a soft ring repeatedly draws inward.
• ·thinking — retrieving and reasoning: fast, saturated counter-rotating churn.
• ·answer — "found it": one bright ring lands with a flash, then the swirls settle into a slow, confident glide. The flash replays on re-entering the state.
• ·Palette derives from --app-blue (the accent bridge) — the character re-tints with the Foundation accent, zero configuration.
• ·Rendered by the system's one sanctioned shader surface — the Paper Design heatmap shader wrapped around a circle: thermal energy flowing around the orb's edge, over a frosted-glass wrapper (--ambient-blur).
• ·Each state moves differently, not just faster: still breathes a balanced rim glow; listening draws the heat inward; thinking runs hot — high contour, grain, racing flow; answer blooms outward once and settles.
• ·State changes are transitions, never cuts — per-state weights and tempo ease continuously (~0.5s).
• ·Every state has its own configurable cadence (speed.still/listening/thinking/answer), persisted with the theme.
• ·Palette is accent-linked by default (a thermal ramp derived from the accent); uncheck accent-linked to set custom colors — they become the heat ramp, cold to hot (up to four, add/remove).
• ·State is driven through the assistant context (orbState) — the response pipeline sets it, components read it.
• ·THE PIPELINE OWNS IT WHILE A TURN IS RUNNING. thinking holds until the prose actually starts — not until the answer was composed, because the evidence blocks still have to run — then answer, then still on settle. Ambient input states (listening / still) only apply between turns; typing cannot cancel a thinking state mid-run.

When to use

• ·As the assistant's face — the floating orb is this character at 52px.
• ·Anywhere the AI's lifecycle needs to be visible: avatars, processing surfaces.

When not to

• ·As decoration on pages where no AI is present — the character means the AI is here.
• ·ONE CHARACTER PER SURFACE, in the row you speak to it: the composer mark, the quick-ask pill, and the resting orb. Not headers, not footers, not navigation. A shell that stamps the character on every bar is signing itself once per component, and the mark stops meaning "the assistant is listening here" and starts meaning "logo".