Wireless acoustic tracking for extended range telepresence

Abstract

Abstract-Telepresence systems enable a user to experience virtual or distant environments by providing sensory feedback. Appropriate devices include head mounted displays (HMD) for visual perception, headphones for auditory response, or even haptic displays for tactile sensation and force feedback. While most common designs use dedicated input devices like joysticks or a space mouse, the approach followed in the present work takes the user's position and viewing direction as an input, as he walks freely in his local surroundings. This is achieved by using acoustic tracking, where the user's pose (position and orientation) is estimated on the basis of ranges measured between a set of ceiling-mounted loudspeakers and a microphone array fixed on the user's HMD. To allow for natural user motion, a wearable, fully wireless telepresence system is introduced. The increase in comfort compared to wired solutions is obvious, as the user's awareness of distracting cables is taken away during walking. Lightweight design and small dimensions contribute to ergonomics, as the whole assembly fits well into a small backpack.

Do Immersive Displays Influence Exhibition Attendees’ Satisfaction?: A Stimulus-Organism-Response Approach

“…Second, the study shows a numerical result of attendees' perceptions of general technology displays and immersive displays. Previous studies of technology displays and immersive displays investigated a system for a specific technology display [43,45,46,52,56,[59][60][61]80,81], showing the differences between the proposed system [9,11,55,57,82,83] and the existing system, or attendees' reactions to the proposed system [29,53,54,[84][85][86][87]. However, in this research, various displays are presented simultaneously, showing the result of perceptions to displays as a whole.…”

“…When emitting an identifiable sound signal in a certain space, a wireless signal is periodically exchanged between a user-worn device and the fixed speaker sensor. When using acoustic tracking, errors can occur in transferring information in noisy surroundings; thus, acoustic tracking can be combined with other tracking methods for higher accuracy [61].…”