Start collecting a stable of “smart” gadgets in your life, and you might quickly find yourself sliding down a slippery slope, unable to look at anything you interact with on a daily basis without that thought popping into your head: “wouldn’t it be neat if this could run [platform of choice]?” For those of us blessed by inspiration and armed with a little DIY know-how, it doesn’t take long for thoughts like that to start manifesting themselves in the form of projects, and one Google engineer’s been getting a lot of attention recently for the very impressive-looking hardware he managed to cook up, marrying an Android UI with an otherwise very traditional bathroom mirror.

The mirror’s still a mirror, but embedded behind its glass is an LCD panel wired to an Amazon Fire stick and running a custom Android UI. That gives it some simple weather-forecasting and news-reporting tools, all without cluttering things up too much – this is a mirror after all, and we still need to see our smiling mug in it.

Creator Max Braun still talks about some avenues for improvement – like for as nice as this setup looks from the outside, there are still a few extra wires hanging loose inside the medicine cabinet behind the screen. And it’s also worth noting that there doesn’t appear to be any touch interface here – you may be able to get synopses of the latest headlines, but a more interactive Android-based mirror would take a little extra work.

Even with those considerations in mind, this is still one heck of an impressive project, and we’ve got a feeling it can’t be long before someone decides to take this idea and make a polished commercial product out of it. Would you be eager to add a smart mirror to your own bathroom?

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Source: Max Braun (Medium)
Via: The Verge