Max Braun, a person who's Medium profile tells us that he makes products at Google, recently decided to give his boring bathroom mirror a smart transformation.
In order to start on his transformation experiment, Max ordered himself a two-way mirror, a display panel and controller board. In addition to all this, he also ordered a bunch of components and arts & crafts supplies.
The finished result of his experimentation was a smart mirror which has time and date to the right where one's face is while looking at the mirror. The left of the mirror has the current weather and a 24-hour forecast. Below it are some recent news headlines. Max prefers calling it his finished product rather than his final product as he considers that the product has a long way to go.
If that's all you think the smart mirror does, you're mistaken. In addition to all the things mentioned above, it does a lot of other things too. If the weather is cloudy outside, there will be a little color in the UI but for the most part the text and icons have been left monochrome so as to prevent the mirror from being too distracting to the user.
For the UI, Max has made use of some very simple Android APIs plus the Associated Press for news and Forecast for the weather.
Other concepts that Max is contemplating are reminders, traffic and anything that has a Google Now card. Max's idea behind the smart mirror is that you don’t need to interact with this UI. Instead, it itself automatically does that and there’s an open-ended voice search interface for everything else.
The smart mirror's display is only a couple of millimeters thin and is embedded in a layer between the two-way mirror glass and the door of the medicine cabinet. This way it looks very clean and one can still keep using all the shelf space inside.
How about replacing your own boring bathroom mirror with this one? For now, one thing is for sure, this home made smart mirror has put the entire IoT world in a frenzy.
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