Enabling 6D Pose Tracking on Your Acoustic Devices

The ubiquity of acoustic devices and the fine-grained sensing of acoustic signals have made acoustic device tracking a popular option. We propose to expand the use of commercial devices with microphones as an extension of the audio system to support intelligent applications, such as VR/AR. This paper introduces a novel 6D acoustic pose estimation system. To realize device-based pose estimation, most existing systems deploy multiple speakers. However, due to limited inaudible bandwidth, concurrent transmissions with multiple speakers pose challenges in balancing resolution and frame rate. To address this problem, we design 2×Track, a band multiplexing signal model that doubles the availability of limited bandwidth by utilizing a unique encoding strategy for concurrent transmissions. We also propose solutions to enhance signal feature estimation and implement a 6DoF pose tracking scheme tailored for distributed systems. The prototype is deployed on a typical circular microphone array, and experimental results show that 2×Track achieves a median position and orientation error of 7.6mm and 4.1°, respectively, in a 4-speaker setup. Our extended applications on commercial devices also showcase the versatility of our system, particularly in face orientation detection, air mouse and drone tracking.