Intelligent mirror shows what you will look like in 5, 10, 20 years

Accenture Laboritories is working on an intelligent mirror that analyses your behavioural patterns and can show you what you'll look like in five years time. The mirror is designed as a health-aid to assist people in visualising the long term outcomes of their behaviour and modify their behaviour accordingly. In actual fact, the mirror is a computer-driven LCD screen that captures your image with a digital camera and then based on what the entire system is monitoring of your lifestyle and behavioural patterns - the complex mix of diet, exercise, calorific input, activity levels and the amount of social drugs such as alcohol, tobacco et al imbibed and so on.

Global management consulting, technology services Accenture is normally associated with failsafe secure corporate computing. The company consults to the world's largest companies including 84 of the Fortune Global 100 and two-thirds of the Fortune Global 500. So the recent announcement of some fascinating research developments at Accenture's Technology Lab in Southern France served to highlight the size and diversity of the IT giant's work..

The company has developed a mirror that reflects what you'll look like in five or ten years time. In actual fact, the mirror is a computer-driven LCD screen that captures your image with a digital camera and then based on what the entire system is monitoring of your lifestyle and behavioural patterns - the complex mix of diet, exercise, calorific input, activity levels and the amount of social drugs such as alcohol, tobacco et al imbibed and so on.

The mirror is many years from market, and indeed will require an accurate behavioural profile that's probably too complex to achieve passively (without you filling in a regular questionairre) in the short term future.

"Our Development and Research staff have identified what the two main technical elements are, said Accenture's martin Illsley.

"They consist of the visual part (image acquisition, face tracking, image manipulation) and the behaviour analysis part (behaviour data collection and aggregation, behaviour assessment).

"In the final application, the latter drives the former. That is, behaviour assessment gives a "behavioural index" [-1:1] which is used in the visual part to determine the type and extent of the image changes.

"Our initial effort will go mainly into the visual elements, in order to prove that a computer-based mirror is feasible. Then, we'll concentrate on behaviour analysis, using an "evolutionary" approach, i.e. adapting the methods to results of initial testing with users and testing again.

New Scientist magazine has an excellent article on the new mirror.