Mirror, Mirror
“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, is it supposed to rain today?”
In case your mirror can’t show you news updates yet, Max Braun, an engineer at Google, has designed and built his own personal smart mirror. Besides being able to look at yourself and wonder why your brain can’t develop something this genius, with this mirror you can see the weather forecast, news and traffic updates, and the time. Can your mirror do that?
While a commercial version has not been fully released yet, one will no doubt be available soon. Just imagine the possibilities! The future smart mirror could act as an outfit database like the one Cher had in Clueless. It could offer you compliments and motivational quotes. It could even have apps that you would find on your phone. It could have filters so you could see what your makeup looks like in different lighting (sunny, cloudy, fluorescent, etc.) and if it has Snapchat, it could have full body Snapchat filters. I don’t even want to know what that would entail.
There are also practical uses, of course, like being able to take selfies without your phone blocking your on-fleekness. You could watch makeup tutorials and be able to apply your newfound skills immediately while comparing your face to that of a beautiful and flawless makeup artist. And there’s no question that Kim Kardashian-West would make excellent use of a smart mirror. Hey, she’ll probably be Instagramming naked bathroom selfies in her new smart mirror before any of us can save up the money to buy a venti drink at Starbucks.
As with any new technology, there are some precautions we should keep in mind. Do you really want something that’s connected to the Internet to see you waking up after a rough night’s sleep, getting out of the shower, or oh-so gracefully flossing your teeth? Will constant advertisements soon invade our own faces, too? And would the applications and visuals interfere with our reflections? I mean come on, winged eyeliner is hard enough without another update about the presidential campaign popping up.
