Google Engineer Creates Homemade Smart Mirror

A classic trope of futuristic movies and television shows is those large, well-designed smart screens or mirrors that, say, Adam Gibson, Tony Stark, or Ethan Hunt might use to assess their particular situation. We may already have the hoverboards and self-driving cars of the future, but while we wait for those high-tech screens to become an everyday reality, Google software engineer Max Braun decided to get a jumpstart on the process and build one himself. 

Braun picked up a two-way mirror, display panel, and controller board and got to work. Using Android and weather forecast APIs, along with an Associated Press RSS feed, he managed to get the glass to display a host of information. The result is pretty slick, on the outside at least.

The mirror looks straight out of a movie (behind it, however, there's a small tangle of wires that aren't exactly Hollywood ready). Braun says he wants to continue to fiddle with the backend. At the moment, the user interface is just a few lines of code. The inventor looked at different devices to run it—first Chromecast, then Nexus Player, and currently an Amazon Fire TV Stick. He's also playing with adding traffic reports, reminders, and other features. 

For a work in progress, it's pretty amazing.

[h/t: Gizmodo]

Images via Max Braun, Medium