This year at CES we got to see wacky ideas about the Internet of Things, like Samsung's new refrigerator with a gigantic touchscreen, so there's a lot to be desired in the wild new era of smart-objects. That's why this elegant mirror from Google software engineer Max Braun is so exciting — it looks like something you'd actually want in your home right now.

Braun posted the results of his project on Medium, and the photos look almost unreal. It shares the same information you can glance at on an Android phone — the weather, the time, and a glance at the top headlines — but somehow it makes even more sense on a bathroom mirror. It's the kind of sleek near-future sci-fi of Ex Machina and Gorilla Glass concept videos, where every translucent surface in your world seamlessly springs to life with information from the cloud.

Braun says it took a bit of experimentation to get such a slick result, and that he's not done tweaking the concept. Right now the mirror's UI updates automatically thanks to Android APIs for news and weather, and it can even listen for questions with the voice search feature in Google's mobile app. Hopefully next CES we'll see more ideas like this, and fewer fridges with giant touchscreens.