Ooo NOW we're talkin'! hahaa 
Very nice job Rich. Great floor texture, and nice job too on the distortion of the floor through the sphere, and the perspective aspects too.
Excellent!
Let's explore part of this effect shall we?...
I'd like to take this opportunity to bring up a good point about spherical distortions...
Does anyone own a clear glass orb/sphere? I do. It's about 2"x2". And as i look through it while it's sitting on a tiled texture (or even when holding it above my keybaord), i'm noticing that the very center of the distorted tile surface is VERY stretched out, for lack of a better word.
It's like when you apply the Spherize filter 5 or 6 times, until the center area gets REALLY big and stretched. Try it!
The only time that the underlying surface texture/tile does NOT get that stretched out looking/distorted, is when you lift the sphere off the surface. The further away the sphere gets from the surface, the clearer and less distorted the tile/texture becomes. But then there's one more VERY important thing to take note of... the image refracted/magnified through the glass is upside down! And so are the reflections seen on the sphere's surface!
So for instance, with Rich's example, showing the orb sitting right on the tiles floor like that... the tiles would not be distinguishable at all. All you'd see is a blurred out bunch of over-stretched lines. Almost not even worth putting in huh? 
So... knowing this now... let's see some more examples shall we!?
