What's the first thing you do when you wake up? I suspect you reach over to the nightstand, grab your phone and see what you've missed during the seven hours you inconsiderately turned your back on the world to be unconscious.

My vision is always blurry for the first ten minutes after I get up. Rather than stick my phone two inches in front of my face, I'd prefer to get out of bed and see my missed texts, news, weather or whatever information I need on a larger surface; at least three hackers want the same thing, and have cobbled together their own solutions.

Brooklyn-based Hannah Mittelstaedt is an Android Engineer at Etsy. That being the case, she's swimming in Android devices—"We had too many," she writes—so she took a trip to Canal Plastic Center, bought a cheap two-way mirror and stuffed a hacked 2012 Nexus 7 behind it. "Sad old devices are ideal" for her Home Mirror project, says Mittelstaedt. Here's the result:

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Netherlands-based tinkerer Michael Teeuw was on a trip to New York City when he spotted a mirror featuring an illuminated sign inside Macy's. "[I thought] this is something I could build myself, only better," he writes. "I wanted my own Magic Mirror!"

Back home he went on numerous shopping/observation trips where he studied a variety of computer monitors, and the store clerks must've thought he was crazy, as he spent most of his time examining the backs of the monitors rather than the screens. "Most (cheap) 24" monitors have a native 1080P resolution," so he was more concerned with how the thing would mount to the wall. Monitors with rear-mounted connections were a no-go.

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Teeuw then tore off the back, built a DIY wooden frame, added a Raspberry Pi and coded up the interface.

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As cool as Mittelstaedt and Teeuw's mirrors are, they lack interactivity. "When I started the project, I figured the interface would not allow any direct interaction with using the mirror," Teeuw writes. "This would result in grease and smudges on my shiny mirror, but more important: there are better devices for user interaction. I wanted the Magic Mirror to be a passive source of information."

"What was even more important is the fact that the mirror should be usable as a mirror, and thus it should not be completely filled with (useless) information. Only the outer corners should be used for content. Leaving enough room to see my shiny self."

Inspired by both Mittelstaedt and Teeuw, Washington-based web developer Evan Cohen decided he'd develop his own Smart Mirror, and see if he could push it a bit further. Cohen took Teeuw's Raspberry Pi/monitor approach, decided to crack the interactivity problem with voice commands and connected the system to his Philips Hue lightbulbs to boot. Luckily for us, he's made a video to demonstrate how it all turned out:

For those of you hack-tastic enough to try your hand, details for the individual projects are available at the links above. In addition, there are several more you can check out here.