Projects: Mobile Surround Sound

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Use your phones as surround speakers.

It will certainly be interesting to have technology from Dolby integrated into phones, like it was demonstrated at the CTIA Wireless in 2008. However, there is no precise information about future roadmaps or products.

What the students Stefan Damm and Arnold Ahrer from the Mobile Computing-department of the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg (Austria) created is a small solution to enable real surround sound through mobile phones.

It works by using four different mobile phones, which have to be placed into the corners of the room. Essentially, the phones are turned into speakers, albeit with a bit more intelligence than the usual speaker. A central control PC is connected via WLAN to the phones and is able to control them in real time.

Once all phones are connected, the PC starts the sound on all phones at the same time. The user can now move the sound source on the graphical interface of the server. This automatically adjusts the volume of the different speakers, thus leading to the impression that the sound is moving around in the room.

Also great to put your phones to good use if you've already got too many of them ;-)

The application was developed by Stefan and Arnold as a small project for the Interaction Technology course during the summer semester. It is written in Java (Server) / Java ME (Client) and is available for free (open source).

Quick Facts

Control the sound source from the desktop server application.

Compatibility

• Java ME / MIDP 2.0 compatible phone
• Maturity level:
    Generally works fine (Alpha)

Developed by

• Stefan Damm
• Arnold Ahrer
• "Interaction Technology" course project at:
  Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences
  Campus Hagenberg, Department of "Mobile Computing"
• Supervised by: Andreas Jakl

Published

• September 2008

Price

• Freeware

More Information

• Please contact the developers for more information.

Download

• Java (Desktop) and Java ME / MIDP 2.0: English (Documentation and source code)

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