A six-month bed rest after ACL surgery in 2016 created the unexpected opportunity to start building things. After days of browsing DIY projects on Pinterest, the Magic Mirror project emerged as the first step toward something that felt like real-world Augmented Reality.
The backstory starts in a tuition class, when a friend mentioned a project called "Sixth Sense", a gesture-based computing demo created by an inventor from India.
As a Computer Science undergraduate (though automotive engineering was always the real interest), the idea of replicating "Sixth Sense" stayed in the back of the mind. In the final year, there was a plan to tackle it as the main project. By then, the basics of image processing with OpenCV and Matlab were solid. An academic advisor counseled against such a complex scope, so the project shifted to an Android file-encryption app instead. After graduation, work at an MNC took over and the idea faded.
In August 2016, a leg injury during a football match led to an ACL replacement surgery and a six-month bed rest. With time to fill, endless Pinterest scrolling landed on "Magic Mirror", the closest thing to "Sixth Sense" that could be built at home.
On a September evening, the MagicMirror GitHub repo was cloned and Node.js and JavaScript became the new focus. The well-documented getting-started guide had everything up and running on a Windows machine within a couple of hours. After seeing the UI come to life, a Raspberry Pi 3 and a set of sensors (motion, ultrasonic, temperature and humidity) were ordered from Amazon.
MagicMirror: