The Half silvered mirror proved perfect for projecting light through while still maintaining a mirror finish when enough light was not passed through. Positioning a projector or other display behind the screen produces a very cool effect when images are displayed. It works based on a light differnece from the front and back. If the light coming from behind the mirror is greater than the intensity of the light shining on the surface you will see the image behind the mirror. This allows the black color of the LCD display to appear as a mirror surface while other colors shine through. It is important to remember that some light reflects so the image will apear much more dim than if viewed without the mirror.
The E-Box is a low cost system on a chip computer with an x86 architecture. It has several ports including USB, VGA, Serial and Mouse/Keyboard. Further descriptin may be seen here.This device was loaded with Windows CE and powered the Mirror Application. This computer may be loaded from microSD or Flash Drive. It may also be booted from the network which provides an easy development platfrom from Visual Studio 2005
Two banks of IR reflective sensors were used. 4 were placed along the side and 3 across the Top. In addition a sonar distance sensor was added for presence sensing. These sensors were connected with the phidgets interface that connected to the E-Box via USB. Drivers and code for the phidgets control the gesture interface.
For the display a 37inch LCD was used. While this was effective a better desin would use a brighter display such as a projector, plasma, or LCD with LED backlighting.
The project was written in c# using Microsoft Visual Studio. The Operating system used is Windows CE 5.0 with .net Compact 2.0. The Source code is located here and may be compiled in the same enviroment. The other non basic requirements of the Windows CE build is that the Phidgets Drivers be added and internet connectivity be enabled. Google Api dll files for windows mobile are also required resources. They can be found at googles api development page. The widgets (with the exception of calendar) are rendered in html and displayed with the webbrowser control which relies on Internet Explorer 6.0 for windows CE.