A Software-Based Sonar Ranging Sensor for Smart Phones

We live in a 3-D world. However, the smart phones that we use every day are incapable of sensing depth, without the use of custom hardware. By creating new depth sensors, we can provide developers with the tools that they need to create immersive mobile applications that take advantage of the 3-D nature of our world. In this paper, we propose a new sonar sensor for smart phones. This sonar sensor does not require any additional hardware, and utilizes the phone's microphone and rear speaker. The sonar sensor calculates distances by measuring the elapsed time between the initial pulse and its reflection. We evaluate the accuracy of the sonar sensor by using it to measure the distance from the phone to an object. We found that we were able to measure the distances of objects accurately with an error bound of 12 cm.