Mirror Ritual

A mirror that writes a poem tailored to your emotions

Mirror Ritual is an interactive art piece, taking the form of a mirror that when looked at will display an AI generated poem over your reflection. The piece was designed by Nina Rajcic as part of her PhD at Monash University.

The mirror hides a screen and camera behind a sheet of two way glass. The camera can see through the glass and waits to recognise the face of a viewer. Once it finds a face the system runs an emotion categorisation algorithm to determine the emotional state of the face it found. This emotion data used as the input into a Deep Neural Network which generates the poem that is then displayed on the screen, the bright text on the black screen shines through the two way glass and the viewer sees the poem appear on top of their reflection.

Two iterations of the mirror have been created. The first version was a simple wooden frame around a standard computer monitor. This worked well as a proof of concept but for proper exhibition we wanted a more complete version.

The second iteration of the Mirror involved a circular sheet of glass with a custom built backing the housed an LCD panel, the webcam and the required electronics to allow for the mirror to back light itself. The custom backing was made from sheets of acrylic that were laser cut and glued to the glass. The screen was a modified desktop monitor, the front plastic enclosure was removed, allowing the panel to sit right up against the glass. The back of the monitor enclosure was integrated into the custom backing and held all of the parts in place.

The outer ring was made from diffusing acrylic to ensure a soft light around the mirror. Under this diffuser was a ring of 40 coloured LEDs which could be controlled by the system running the mirror. The colour and intensity of the lights are determined by the emotion data the mirror sees.