Anyone who has a purely functional relationship with exercise will tell you that finding the will to haul oneself out of bed and hit the gym or running track requires Herculean effort and iron determination. It doesn’t help that it can sometimes take weeks and even months before you see any perceptible physical change in your body. It really does beg the question, how does anyone find the inclination to carry on? The team at the oddly, but accurately named, United States-based Naked Labs has come up with a unique answer: a mirror that lets you see, in real-time, the effect of your workout on your body. The brainchild of New Zealand-born Farhad Farahbakhshian and United Kingdom-born Ed Sclater, the Naked 3-D Fitness Tracker is a full-length mirror embedded with 3-D sensors, and is enabled with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. When the user stands on an accompanying turntable in front of the mirror, it uses infrared light and the weight information from the table to create a 3D model of the individual’s body, allowing the mirror to calculate accurate body fat percentage and track muscle growth and fat loss in real time. It also allows the user to set and track goals and see time-lapses of how their body has changed over time. The idea behind the mirror was to motivate a behavioural change in people. “It is so hard to get and stay healthy, when we all lead such busy lives,” says Naked Labs’ CEO Farhad Farahbakhshian. “If you aren’t seeing any progress, it’s easy to give up. But getting a real sense of how your hard work is paying off is a great motivational boost and helps us understand how our decisions affect our body, empowering us to make more informed decisions.” Naked Labs currently has working models of the mirror and is in the process of internal beta testing.
The mirror is priced at US$699 (Dh2,570) for limited pre-orders in some countries, and is expected to be available for international shipping by next March for $999 (Dh3,670).
