Smart Mirror Development and Business Concept for "Jugend Gründet"

The build is deceptively simple: a two-way mirror with a display mounted behind it, so the screen is invisible where it shows black and reads as text floating in the glass where it doesn't. Behind that sits a small computer driving a dashboard — time, weather, calendar and notifications — sized and positioned so the information sits beside your reflection rather than across it.

"Jugend Gründet" is a German national student entrepreneurship competition, and it asks for far more than a working prototype: a business plan, a market and competitor analysis, a costing and pricing model, and a pitch defended in front of a jury.

That made this the first project where the engineering was the smaller half of the work. Deciding who the product was actually for, what it should cost, and how to explain it to people who had never seen one turned out to be harder than getting the display to sit behind the glass — and the presentation practice has been useful in every technical review since.