From weather to emails: Microsoft unveils Magic Mirror for busy users

Most people have just enough time to brush their teeth and run out of the door in the morning.

For those who find themselves crunched for time, Microsoft has developed a smart mirror that displays all the updates you need before leaving for work.

Called Magic Mirror, this devices recognizes and greets users, reads emotion and displays the weather, time and other relevant information - while still showing your reflection, reports the Daily Mail.

The cutting-edge technology was recently demoed at the InnovFest Unbound 2016, a digital technology conference in Singapore.

“Imagine when you wake up in the morning, you're able to use the mirror to style your hair, do your make up, and while doing that, you can also view the weather,” Izzat Khair, a member of Microsoft Singapore's developer experience team explained.

It is a one-way mirror that is made smart with a 23.6-inch LCD-lit screen sitting behind it and shows white UI elements on a black background.

When the display is powered on, users can see both their reflection and the white elements in the mirror.

Magic Mirror uses Windows Hello technology for facial recognition and Raspberry Pi powers the device.

“To power the mirror, we chose a Raspberry Pi because of its popularity, price point, support, and hardware specs,' Microsoft stated in a blog post.

Since Magic Mirror was designed for those in a time crunch, the firm placed more-pressing information at the top of the mirror and the less relevant updates towards the bottom – “where it can be ignored or consciously consumed”.

All this magic is done by a built-in camera integrated with a facial-recognition system, which can recognize eight different emotions, such as anger and happiness.

This technology could lead to a product that benefits markers in learning user experience while viewing their ads.

The tech giant also built a Hosted Webb App using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which it converted into a Universal Windows app to power the Raspberry Pi.

It is hosted in Azure and to add the personal touch, the app links to Microsoft Cognitive Services using the Face API.

To personalize Magic Mirror, users first create a profile and register their face by taking a lovable selfie.

The picture is then sent to Cognitive Services to create a unique identifier that is stored in MongoDB.