Microsoft has developed a mirror that can read your emotions

You CAN be smart and good-looking. That's the message from Microsoft's Magic Mirror - a so-called smart mirror that can recognize and greet users, read their emotions and display the weather, time and other information. All the while looking just like a regular mirror.

"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.

The Magic Mirror has a hidden facial-recognition camera that can detect eight human emotions, including anger, happiness and surprise. Microsoft plans to expand the mirror's features, allowing it to show app-fed news as well as Facebook and Twitter feeds in a display panel.

"Imagine on the monitor of the mirror, you're able to play an advertisement. And you have a camera that can snap a photo of the users that are viewing the advertisement," he said.

In keeping with the focus on cyber security, Khair said that the data processed by the mirror was stored on a private cloud that Microsoft's programmers could not access, and the data was deleted after seven days.

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