On a family trip to Amsterdam we spent a day at NEMO, the big green science museum by the harbour. It's five floors of things to poke, pull, and climb on, and my son treated it accordingly — thirty seconds per exhibit, maximum, before racing to the next one.
Except for one.
Tucked among the exhibits was a camera pointed at a screen that mirrored the picture vertically down the centre. That's the whole trick. Both halves of your face become the same half. Raise one arm and you sprout wings. Two kids lean in and become one glorious four-armed creature.
He stood in front of it for half an hour. Laughing, experimenting, dragging strangers in to try it. We had to negotiate our exit.
Somewhere over the North Sea on the way home, we decided the obvious thing: every family should have one of these, and nobody should have to fly to Amsterdam for it.
So we built one
Magic Mirror is that museum exhibit, plus forty-three more like it, running in an ordinary web browser. A laptop and an HDMI cable turn any TV into the thing my son couldn't walk away from — a big, bright, kid-proof mirror that does impossible things.
We had three rules while building it:
- It has to work in a minute. Parents setting up a party have seventeen other jobs. Open a link, plug in a cable, done. No install, no account, no faff.
- Nothing leaves the device. These are children at a birthday party. Every frame is processed locally in your browser — no uploads, no cloud, no server, no exceptions. We couldn't peek even if we wanted to.
- Kids are the testers. Every effect ships only after our chief tester (age 7) has laughed at it. Several didn't make the cut. He is not a lenient reviewer.
Why it's £6.99
Photo booth hire for a party starts at about £199 — for one afternoon. We wanted the same "everyone crowds round the screen" magic to cost less than a round of party bags, and to be yours for every party after that, forever. One payment, no subscription, and every effect we add in the future is included.
Three of our favourite effects are free with no catch, because the best way to understand Magic Mirror is to stand in front of it and pull a face.
— Martin (instigator) & the Magic Mirror team
P.S. If you're ever in Amsterdam, NEMO is wonderful. Tell the mirror we said hello.