VibroComm: Using Commodity Gyroscopes for Vibroacoustic Data Reception

What is it about?

Gyroscopic sensors are now standard in mobile devices, such as smartphones and watches. We show that these sensors can be repurposed for vibroacoustic data reception, opening a unique communication channel. Our approach – which we call VibroComm – requires direct physical contact with a transmitting object. This is in contrast to wireless methods like Bluetooth and NFC, which require mere proximity. This property makes VibroComm interactions targeted and explicit in nature, making it well suited for contexts with many targets and interactions requiring presence and intent. We found that Frequency-Shift Keying, using 3-bit symbols, transmitted at 1000 symbols per second, offered the highest bit rate. This translates to just over 2000 bits per second with less than 5% packet loss with error correction. Although most devices will need to be instrumented with a vibroacoustic transducer, we did find that devices with speakers can be co-opted to emit VibroComm data, requiring no extra hardware. We describe a set of use cases that could be enabled on mobile devices with a simple software update.

Featured Image

Photo by naipo.de on Unsplash

Photo by naipo.de on Unsplash