A Refrigerator Magnet That Recommends Movies

It’s 3 a.m. and you can’t sleep—time for a bowl of cereal and a late night movie. But at that hour, who has the energy to decide what to watch? Soon, a refrigerator magnet will be able to choose for you. ChilFlix, created by David Choi, Steve Gong, Lance Jordan, and Katilin Till-Landry for the GE Firstbuild hackathon “Think Inside the Icebox,” uses a light sensor inside the company’s new Wi-Fi enabled Chillhub to determine the time of day a user is raiding the fridge and then provide an appropriate movie recommendation.

The team explained to PSFK that

A sensor inside the fridge detects light and triggers the code which communicates to an Arduino inside the wireless Chilflix fridge magnet to display the movie title on the led panel. Between midnight and 4am, Chilflix is making comedy, drama and adventure movie recommendations, and between 5am and 8am, Chilflix is making science fiction, horror and thriller recommendations.

Because Netflix shut down their public API in 2014, Chilflix uses recommendations from themoviedb.org instead.

Chilflix didn’t win the hackathon—the first place prize went to FoodShare, a way to share uneaten food with your neighbors to reduce waste—but who can deny the appeal of letting technology make tough decisions for you? 

[h/t PSFK]