The mirror is augmented with colored lights and physical icons to indicate the remote partner’s presence. A number of red, green, and blue LEDs are attached to the mirror’s frame and then covered with translucent paper. When the LEDs are lit, the paper helps to smooth and spread the color along the frame, rather than having light at a few discrete points. The frame glows green when the user’s loved one comes online, red when offline and blue when idle. When a text message is sent by the loved one to the user, the LEDs are lit in succession creating a cycling color effect (lasting a few seconds). A simple electronic circuit receives the loved one’s presence information from a networked computer connected to it and decides which LEDs to turn on and off.
Source: Dey, A. K. and de Guzman, E. 2006. From awareness to connectedness: The Design and Deployment of Presence Displays In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’06). ACM Press, 899–908.
