Accenture's Persuasive Mirror Shows You What You'll Look Like in 6 Months
March 26 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Technology Year: 2008 Month: Nov Rating: 12 Hot
Accenture
is just months away from releasing a product it calls the
Persuasive Mirror,
a product that allows you to view a simulation of your face as it’s
projected to look 6 months in the future. Equipped with sensors and
software capable of extrapolating your face based on consistent
visual input, the mirror accomplishes its work automatically.
At a touch of the screen, the Persuasive Mirror offers suggestions about how to improve your look. For example, it may tell you to “walk to work today” or “stay away from junk foods for the next week.”
Accenture believes that such “continuous visual feedback on behavior” will have a positive effect on the way we manage our lifestyles. In other words, looking our future face directly in the face is likely to frighten us into healthier behavior.
My opinion is that, while a bit unnerving, such products are probably inevitable in a world of constant innovation and inexorable quantification of everything. Just as futurists extrapolate the state of larger systems in order to generate best-guess simulations, the Persuasive Mirror does this for the smaller facial system. As we continue to get better at the real-time quantification of the body, the health benefits will become obvious and so we’ll continue on our path down the rabbit hole. This will likely result in sensor networks embedded throughout and around our bodies, similar to the pervasive sensing that futurists argue will saturate our environment. After all, we are part of that environment.
