TRACKING DEVICE WITH SOUND EMITTER FOR USE IN OBTAINING INFORMATION FOR CONTROLLING GAME PROGRAM EXECUTION

• US 20110014981A1
• Filed: 09/27/2010
• Published: 01/20/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 05/08/2006
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc. (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Sony Computer Entertainment Incorporated (Sony Group Corp.)
• Inventors: Mao, Xiadong, Marks, Richard L., Zalewski, Gary M.
• Application Number:
  US12/891,633
• Publication Number:
  US 20110014981A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 463/36
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 2300/1081 Input via voice recognition
• CPC Class Codes: A63F 2300/6072 of an input signal, e.g. pitch and rhythm extraction, voice recognition
• CPC Class Codes: H04R 2430/23 Direction finding using a sum-delay beam-former
• CPC Class Codes: H04R 3/005 for combining the signals of two or more microphones specially adapted for hearing aids H04R25/407

Abstract

A tracking device may include a body, a sound emitter operable to emit a sound, an array of two or more microphones adapted to produce discrete time domain input signals at a runtime, one or more processors coupled to the array of two or more microphones; and a memory coupled to the microphones and the processor. The memory has a set of processor readable instructions embodied therein. The instructions include one or more instructions for:

determining a listening direction of the sound source relative to the microphone array from the discrete time domain input signals; using the listening direction in a semi-blind source separation to select filtering functions that separate out sounds from the sound emitter from the discrete time domain input signals; identifying a listening zone containing the sound emitter from the filtering functions; and determining a location of the sound emitter from the identified listening zone.

Claims

1. A tracking device for use in obtaining information for controlling an execution of a program by a processor, comprising:

a body;

a sound emitter operable to emit a sound;

an array of two or more microphones M₀ . . . M_M wherein each of the two or more microphones is adapted to produce a discrete time domain input signal x_m(t) at a runtime;

one or more processors coupled to the array of two or more microphones; and

a memory coupled to the microphones and the processor, the memory having embodied therein a set of processor readable instructions, the processor readable instructions including;

one or more instructions for determining a listening direction of the sound source relative to the microphone array from the discrete time domain input signals x_m(t);

one or more instructions for using the listening direction in a semi-blind source separation to select filtering functions that separate out sounds from the sound emitter from the discrete time domain input signals x_m(t);

one or more instructions for identifying a listening zone containing the sound emitter from the filtering functions; and

one or more instructions for determining a location of the sound emitter from the identified listening zone.

2. The tracking device of claim 1, wherein the body is mountable to a controller, the controller including a controller body and at least one input device assembled with the controller body.

3. An apparatus including the tracking device and the controller as claimed in claim 2.

4. The tracking device of claim 1, wherein the body of the tracking device is mountable to a user'"'"'s body.

5. The tracking device as claimed in claim 1, wherein the sound emitter includes at least one of a speaker, a buzzer, a horn or a pipe.

6. The tracking device of claim 1 wherein the program is a game program.

7. The tracking device of claim 6, wherein the processor is operable to register an input when the sounds from the sound emitter satisfy a predetermined criterion.

8. The tracking device of claim 7, wherein the sound emitter is operable to emit a sound specific to a particular user associated with the tracking device and the one or more processors are operable to register input specific to the particular user when the specific sound is emitted.

9. The tracking device of claim 7 or 8, wherein the predetermined criterion includes at least one criterion selected from the group consisting of pitch, audio pulse frequency, audio pulse shape, audio pulse duty cycle, beat frequency, or spectral signature including a spectral content characteristic of a distinctive sound.

10. The apparatus of claim 2 or 3, further comprising a communications interface operable to conduct digital communications with the one or more processors, the controller or both the processor and the controller.

11. The tracking device as claimed in claim 10, wherein the communications interface includes a universal asynchronous receiver transmitter (“

UART”

).

12. The tracking device of claim 11, wherein the UART is operable to perform at least one of receiving a control signal for controlling an operation of the tracking device, or for transmitting a signal from the tracking device for communication with another device.

13. The tracking device of claim 10, wherein the communications interface includes a universal serial bus (“

USB”

) controller.

14. The tracking device of claim 13, wherein the USB controller is operable to perform at least one of receiving a control signal for controlling an operation of the tracking device, or for transmitting a signal from the tracking device for communication with another device.

15. The tracking device of claim 1, wherein the listening direction is determined by

forming analysis frames of a pre-recorded a signal from a source located in a preferred known listening direction,

transforming the analysis frames into the frequency domain,

estimating a calibration covariance matrix from vectors formed from the analysis frames that have been transformed into the frequency domain,

computing an eigenmatrix of the calibration covariance matrix, and

computing an inverse of the eigenmatrix.