
Smart phones, smart cars, smart homes, smart fridges, smart health instruments and now Google may expand the family of smart home appliances too. Nearly every single item you could think of is seeing some digital application of it as a viable thing to add in its construction to make it more useful than before. If you recall some of the craziest CES 2016 gadgets also mentioned a Bluetooth pregnancy test at one point.
Regardless, Google seems to be interested in more than just a few projects. With news of the tech giant being extremely active in more than just a few fields lately, it should not be found as a surprise when we notice that it’s now rumored to be planning to release a smart, Android-powered bathroom mirror. Even if the original device was created independently by a Google employee. It would appear that the individual in question had searched high and low whether anyone had ever attempted this before he started.
With nobody else to have thought of this before, Google engineer Max Braun built a smart replacement for his own bathroom mirror that is smart in the sense in which it has an inbuilt display. The mirror can thus display programmable notifications and information in different sides of it. That way the smart mirror does things such as display the date and time, the forecast for the day (or more or other days if that is your intent), recent news headlines. Who said you can’t brush your teeth and read the news at the same time?
The way Braun build this smart mirror was by employing a two-way mirror, a 15.6” display panel, a 40-ping LCD controller board as well as a push-to-activate momentary switch and terminals. When everything was said and done, Braun managed to single-handedly create a mirror that can be synced with a mobile device and push data and notifications in your bathroom too.
But this is only the beginning and just one man’s work. Braun said he intends to make it a lot more useful than its first prototype by adopting features that work with Google Now such as reminders, traffic updates and other. Braun has already tried running the smart mirror with devices such as Chromecast, Fire TV Stick and Nexus Player, thinking there may be some applicability there.
There’s no telling if Google itself will attempt to buy the concept from Braun, but chances are someone will. Not to mention the amount of headhunting the engineer will have to put up with in the near future.
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