Grouve: Spontaneous Proximal Group Formation with Ultrasonic Sound Waves

Abstract

In daily life, we use computers and smartphones to organize a groups activities and share documents with its members. However, creating that group in the digital domain is often performed manually. Solutions to automate the process of forming a group of physically proximate members, so far, mostly relied on Bluetooth or WiFi. In contrast to these solutions we present Grouve, an automatic ad-hoc based group formation technique running based on ultrasonic waves. As Grouve uses inaudible sounds for communication, it has the natural advantage that the sound signal stays inside a limited space, which matches most of the application contexts. In this paper we report on the design process and implementation of Grouve.