Vernier: Accurate and Fast Acoustic Motion Tracking Using Mobile Devices

Acoustic motion tracking has been viewed as a promising user interaction technique in many scenarios such as Virtual Reality (VR), Smart Appliance, video gaming, etc. Existing acoustic motion tracking approaches, however, suffer from long window of accumulated signal and time-consuming signal processing. Consequently, they are inherently difficult to achieve both high accuracy and low delay. We propose Vernier, an efficient and accurate acoustic tracking method on commodity mobile devices. In the heart of Vernier lies a novel method to efficiently and accurately derive phase change and thus moving distance. Vernier significantly reduces the tracking delay/overhead by removing the complicated frequency analysis and long window of signal accumulation, while keeping a high tracking accuracy. We implement Vernier on Android, and evaluate its performance on COTS mobile devices including Samsung Galaxy S7 and Sony L50t. Evaluation results show that. Vernier outperforms previous approaches with a tracking error less than 4 mm. The tracking speed achieves 3x improvement to existing phase based approaches and 10x to Doppler Effect based approaches. Vernier is also validated in applications like controlling and drawing, and we believe it is generally applicable in many real applications.