Eminence Terrace: Oolaa Mirror in Hung Shui Kiu

As Hong Kong moves toward its Smart City vision, smart living has become a practical key to a better quality of life — and not only in private developments. At Eminence Terrace I in Hung Shui Kiu, a Hong Kong Housing Society dedicated rehousing estate, Oolaa installed smart mirrors in the elevator lobbies. It is Oolaa's first public housing project, and it gives residents a seamless connection to the information of their building and their day.

The idea is simple. Every resident passes through the lobby, usually twice a day. A mirror there is never decoration for long — it becomes part of the routine, the last thing checked before leaving and the first thing seen on coming home. Putting live information on that mirror turns a daily habit into a service, without asking residents to download an app, scan a code, or change how they live.

A bridge between residents and their building

The smart mirror is more than a display. It is a communication bridge for the community, and by showing information in real time it lifts residents' well-being in three concrete ways:

• Real-time weather and traffic information — residents see conditions before they set out, and plan the trip accordingly: an umbrella, an earlier start, a different route.
• Instant building notices and management office information — announcements reach everyone who passes the lobby, closing the distance between the management office and the household.
• A modern design — the mirror lifts the lobby's sense of space and style, making a shared area feel current rather than purely functional.

Anyone who has lived in a large estate knows the weakness of the printed notice: it goes up late, comes down late, and is read by whoever happens to look at the board. A lobby mirror solves the timing problem. Notices appear when they are issued, weather and traffic refresh through the day, and the information meets residents on a route they already take. For elderly residents in particular — the people least served by app-based communication — a large, clear display at the elevator is the most inclusive channel a building can offer.

What a good lobby information point needs

The Eminence Terrace installation follows principles any housing manager can apply. Placement comes first: the display belongs on the natural route through the building, where waiting time already exists — the seconds spent waiting for an elevator are attention no one has to be asked for. Content comes second: a small set of genuinely useful items, kept current, beats a long rotation nobody waits to see. And the medium matters: a mirror belongs in a lobby in a way a bare screen does not, contributing light and a sense of space even between glances. Managed this way, the lobby stops being a corridor and becomes the building's front desk — one that never closes.

The setting matters to the result. Public housing lobbies serve everyone: young families checking the weather before the school run, workers watching traffic before a shift, elderly residents reading the day's notices at their own pace. A single well-placed mirror speaks to all of them in the same glance, with no account to create and no instructions to learn. In Smart City terms, it is infrastructure at human scale — a small, reliable layer of information laid over a place people already trust, working from the first day without a learning curve.

Smart living belongs in every kind of home

Oolaa's work has long centered on bringing technology into everyday life, and Eminence Terrace I extends that thinking to public housing. The same company that supplies smart mirrors and bathroom TVs to luxury developments and hotels applied its experience here, in the lobbies of a rehousing estate — because the benefits of clear, real-time information do not depend on the price of the home.

For the estate's management, the mirror is a channel that is always on. For residents, it is one less thing to chase: the day's weather, the state of traffic, and the building's own news, all in the few seconds the elevator takes to arrive.

That is the quiet test of any community technology: not what it can do in a demonstration, but whether ordinary people, on an ordinary morning, are better informed because it is there — without having changed a single habit to get the benefit.