Location-Aware Speakers for the Virtual Reality Environments

This paper presents location-aware speakers for the immersive virtual reality environments as well as conventional surround sound systems. The surround sound system generally requires multiple speakers fixed in specific positions and connected to dedicated audio jack holes. In this paper, we propose wireless speakers that can aware their locations and dedicated sound channels without troublesome installations. The proposed speakers use the Internet of things devices by combining a Raspberry Pi and a beacon to each speaker, which enable smart and connected applications. Each speaker estimates distances to other speakers from received signal strength indication of beacons with bluetooth low energy signals. By analyzing the relative distances between speakers, we detect the speaker locations in various speaker setups. We experimented our method with three sound system formats in various sizes and analyzed the accuracy of the location detection.