Creative Documentation 

Process

The project can be broken down into 4 phases: ideation, pivot, software implementation, and physical setup.

Phase 1: Ideation

With our first prototype “Mirror Mirror on the Wall”, we tested out ways we can incorporate a mirror into a smart environment. Using the feedback we received from critique, we shifted our project direction from style filters to “going back in time”. However, after researching existing tools and raspberry pi functionalities, we realized that it is too difficult to recreate the past (i.e. what users would look like / be doing in the 1900s) in the given timeframe. This is when we struggled a bit because we had many different ideas for what we could do with a mirror but none of them felt meaningful enough. After discussing with Daragh, one idea we had was a mirror that will detect your emotion — whether you are happy, sad, or angry — and filter the display accordingly. However, the openAI tool we found for emotion recognition has a low accuracy, which led us to narrowing down emotions to just smiles. The idea then became the mirror wants to control you by only showing the normal mirror display when you smile, and when you don’t, it puts on a distorted image of you. This smile detector algorithm worked pretty well and we were finally able to move forward with a set idea.