WalkieLokie: Relative Positioning for Augmented Reality Using a Dummy Acoustic Speaker

TL;DR

WalkieLokie is a novel relative positioning system for augmented reality that uses a dummy acoustic speaker and smart device displacement patterns to accurately determine position and direction.

Contribution

It introduces a new acoustic-based relative positioning method using a dummy speaker and displacement pattern analysis for AR applications.

Findings

Mean ranging error: 0.63m

Mean direction error: 2.46 degrees

Positioning error in shopping mall: 1.28m

Abstract

We propose and implement a novel relative positioning system, WalkieLokie, to enable more kinds of Augmented Reality applications, e.g., virtual shopping guide, virtual business card sharing. WalkieLokie calculates the distance and direction between an inquiring user and the corresponding target. It only requires a dummy speaker binding to the target and broadcasting inaudible acoustic signals. Then the user walking around can obtain the position using a smart device. The key insight is that when a user walks, the distance between the smart device and the speaker changes; and the pattern of displacement (variance of distance) corresponds to the relative position. We use a second-order phase locked loop to track the displacement and further estimate the position. To enhance the accuracy and robustness of our strategy, we propose a synchronization mechanism to synthesize all estimation results from different timeslots. We show that the mean error of ranging and direction estimation is 0.63m and 2.46 degrees respectively, which is accurate even in case of virtual business card sharing. Furthermore, in the shopping mall where the environment is quite severe, we still achieve high accuracy of positioning one dummy speaker, and the mean position error is 1.28m.