A Proposal on Direction Estimation between Devices Using Acoustic Waves
Yasutaka Nishimura, Naoki Imai, Kiyohito Yoshihara · Social Informatics · 2011
How can you easily find a partner in rendezvous whom you have not met before (e.g., a new friend on social network service, a customer in delivery service)? One answer is to display the distance and direction to the partner on your smartphone. Although conventional work has provided keys to perform distance estimation with only commodities like smartphones, direction estimation requires pre-planned infrastructure or special hardware. In this paper, we newly propose a direction estimation method, which monitors Doppler Effect of acoustic waves generated by user’s simple motion. Moreover, we implemented the proposed method, and measured its performance under real-world conditions. The experimental results show that the estimation error ranges within 18.0 degrees, which is practical for the above use cases.