Most people would just settle with an ordinary bathroom mirror to do their morning rituals with. But Max Braun is not like most people who had built his own smart mirror.
The Google engineer wanted his mirror to become more like of the future promised in the movies. But since all the commercially available smart mirrors aren’t really his type, he took upon himself to make a custom one that perfectly fits his taste.
All the individual parts were fairly easy to get, he says. But at the start, Braun didn’t know which parts to get. After experimenting, his finished product was composed of a two-way mirror, a display panel, controller board, a bunch of components and arts & crafts supplies.
Mornings have never been the same for Braun thanks to his smart mirror. When he wakes up, he doesn’t have to check his phone for the time, date, temperature, weather, and news, as his bathroom mirror already provides all of that information for him.
It has a flawless user interface. It features monochrome text and icons to avoid being too distracting. But unless the weather is cloudy, there will be a little color in the UI.
Some simple Android APIs run the entire smart mirror, with Forecast for the weather and the Associated Press for news. Additional applications like traffic, reminders, and basically anything with a Google Now card are still worked on by Braun.
Amid all these usually interactive UI features, Braun’s idea is for the smart mirror to update automatically. It works with an open-ended voice search interface for anything else.
Moreover, it’s not a fixed wall display. The millimeters-thin Internet of Things mirror is embedded in a layer between the two-way mirror glass and the door of the medicine cabinet.
Yet the entire thing is still not finished. According to Braun, its software is still a work in progress and only a few hundred lines of code. To run the UI, he experimented with devices like Google’s Nexus Player and Amazon’s Fire TV, and Chromecast as hardware.
For that, the present prototype still has a messy electronics if you get to peek inside the medicine cabinet.
Source: Medium
