Yes, this is a real thing. It’s a full-body mirror that uses estimations on your height, weight and skin color to create a holographic representation of your real body.
Yes, it remembers what you look like. It does this so well that you can not only view the simulated 3D nudity from any time on your mobile phone, it’ll use its facial recognition technology to automatically strip you when you approach the mirror, so you might want to avoid putting this in your living room.
And finally, last but most importantly: Yes, it has an actual purpose.
The Naked Mirror from Naked Labs offers the tagline, “See yourself like never before”. An odd choice of words, seeing most people have probably seen themselves in the nude before the invention of this mirror, but it does hold some value to it.
While the mirror isn’t busy making you feel strikingly uncomfortable within the safety of your own home, it is keeping track of the diameters of your thighs, telling you your weight, tracking your body fat percentage, and measuring your waistline, automatically, any time you happen to pass in front of it. It’s the perfect measurement device: One you can’t ignore. Say goodbye to the days of ignoring your weight just by not stepping on the scale: Put one of these in your room, and you’ll probably never catch yourself lazing around in bed ever again.
Unless you really commit to only looking at one wall. But it’ll be much more difficult this time.
The Naked Mirror pitches itself as the ultimate scale and the ultimate device for self-tracking. According to the product’s description on the Naked Labs official site, “Weight is just one number”. Which, when weight lifting and strength training is concerned, is very true: Often times, people get frustrated if they’re not dropping pounds off the scale in a few weeks, which increases the chances of them giving up altogether. It’s a very understandable source of frustration for many people looking to get in shape, based on the very difficult-to-solve issue that it is quite hard for a machine to really detect what’s going on in your body. And while this mirror still can’t do that perfectly, it does give you a 3D image as well as many more numbers than just weight. It’s a step in the right direction.
And while the mirror doesn’t directly advertise this, it also can be a very useful tool to encourage people to start working out or to take bigger precautions before eating unhealthy foods. This isn’t because of the Naked scan or the relevant statistical information the machine provides on your body fat percentage: It’s due to the effect of having a mirror in one’s room.
Mirrors have the effect of encouraging a person to act accordingly with their own Self-schemas, or long-held beliefs about who they are and how they operate. Under normal circumstances, many people break their Self-schemas from time to time due to a variety of circumstances: Perhaps they were intoxicated and not thinking straight, perhaps they were thirsty and all that sugary soda was the only drink in the house. But one of the things that allow someone to re-enforce their Self-schemas upon themselves is a visual aid.
For example: If you’ve ever been doing something you shouldn’t have been doing, then caught a reflection of yourself or a picture of yourself doing that thing on social media or out of the corner of your eye, you might recall a feeling of shame or a moment spent questioning your current actions. A very common example is the distorted reflection of one’s face one might see while reaching into the fridge for more food.
Due to this effect, if you like to think of yourself as a person who takes good care of their own physical health, getting a mirror for your room can give you a serious boost to your motivations to work out or eat healthily.
The Naked Mirror is a powerful tool for encouraging yourself to start on or stay on the path to good personal health, whether it’s acting as intended: Telling you your weight and height and fat percentage, or as unintended: helping you catch yourself reaching for another scoop of Mint Chocolate Chip. It’s a good addition to a proven-effective tool at encouraging weight loss through psychological persuasion (A mirror) and a good addition to the world’s growing repertoire of high-tech fitness tools.
Alyssa
August 28, 2018 at 11:43 pm
Technology is crazy to think they invented something like this, but why? I know it said it has a purpose of weighting and measuring you, but I feel like that will only make people more self conscious of themselves and put them down to be constantly measured and evaluated
Maya Asregadoo
August 30, 2018 at 11:41 pm
This seems unnecessary and dangerous. I can just imagine someone who is recovering from an eating disorder buying this and relapsing.
mariya Mokienko
January 23, 2019 at 11:45 am
cool thing, but I’m afraid people are becoming more and more puzzled by their bodies, looks .. and less attention is paid to the inner world .. and more and more they seek motivation from the outside.