@helmi — yes, that’s exactly it. sometimes i might want a mirror, but sometimes perhaps i want it to be a cool live picture, then voice activate (or PIR activate) to a mirror. what I’m saying is that the glass is both the expense point and the “weak point” in terms of the screen. if the object of the mirror is to see myself, well that should be something I can accomplish with a “webcam reflection” - and in that instance I should be able to lay stuff on top (still having that “mirror” feel) — but other times I might not care to see myself, I just want whatever functionality is built into the mirror (weather, calendar, headlines, etc). This started in my brain because i’m trying to figure out why I would shell out $150 to put a mirror in front of a high res screen to make this image … “worse” in quality? a webcam can give a perfect “reflection” on the screen.
So what i’ve been looking at is figuring out how to set the raspi cam to just webstream locally, and then display as the “background”. my cam should come today. someone has already pointed out that the pi may not have the processing power to do this visual loop very quickly ---- and that may be true. if that’s the case then a mirror does make sense. but my macbook air will do it pretty easily using VLC (yes there was lag, but I may have had things set up very inefficiently). But the look of it was cool, no fuzziness, the background image was crisp and the stuff on top was also crisp.
I may be crazy, this may be a dumb idea. It may be semantics, but I think this is still a functional mirror in that it can show me a mirror’d effect if desired.
Perhaps this notion is a magic “frame”. That could be a mirror, or other things. in my head you could combo this up with some 12v flush buttons on the side for different “modes” – outside weather, local undersea webcam, live shot from space station, etc.