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The Goal
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Debug Screen
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Live view
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Android view
The original intent was to develop an audio communications system for transferring data between computers. It turned out that this already existed, so the project was turned in another direction. More specifically towards Batman. Wanting to stay in the realm of audio based systems we decided to see whether it would be possible to create something similar to what is used by Batman in the movie The Dark Knight. And thus Soundscape was born!
Soundscape works by emitting high frequency audio chirps from the loud speakers on your phone or laptop. These sound waves then bounce around the environment and some of them eventually make it back to the emitter. By detecting when these returning chirps arrive distances to the environment can be determined and space can be mapped.
The project is built using java script which means that it runs on basically any device that has a loudspeaker and a microphone. Furthermore, by storing the software on a web server it is accessible from ordinary web browsers without the need for any additional installs.
Having little to no prior experience with java script made the project quite the challenge. Especially the audio generation and recording part. The fact that speakers generally are designed to be as omni-directional as possible makes it difficult to get distance measurements as the chirps bounce around all over the place. Thus, the project as it stands is of limited use, however, the software part of it works as it should and the only real limitation is the hardware.
This, we think is pretty cool, given how foreign java script was to us!
The long term goal for Soundscape is to create a system capable of 3D mapping environments using smartphones similar to what Batman does in The Dark Knight movie. Naturally, the quality witnessed in the movie will be nigh impossible to achieve, but decent imaging should be doable if multiple transceivers are utilized.
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