The instrument

A measured floor plan of any room, from sound alone.

Echo Capture is a set of units you place around a room and leave there. They find each other, listen to the room together, and return its plan. No sightlines to a camera, no lighting, no tape.

Become a design partner

In development. No ship date, no price, and no specification yet.

Why a phone cannot do this

A phone has a speaker at one end and a microphone at the other, so it looks like it should be able to measure a room. We built the phone version first. It cannot, and the reasons are specific rather than a matter of polish.

The built-in microphone array is mono in the flat measurement mode an impulse response needs. The stereo available instead is a synthesised field, not two independent microphones.
Reported audio timing is unreliable. The clock that says when a sound left the speaker drifts by more than the measurement can absorb.
The speaker and the microphone sit centimetres apart, so the echo from a nearby wall arrives buried under the speaker's own ring-down.
Nothing about the transducers is calibrated, and none of it is consistent from one handset to the next.

Units that find each other

Set the units down and they measure the distance between every pair from the direct sound alone, then solve their own positions. In simulation that recovers each unit's position to well under a millimetre and its heading to under a degree, with no reference point given to them.

They do need to hear each other directly: line of sight between units is a requirement rather than a preference, and a room divided by furniture or partitions constrains where they can go.

Three kinds of room

Real estate and floor plans

A measured plan of a property without a tape measure, a laser, or a second visit — including the rooms that are dark, cluttered, or awkward to stand in.

Accessibility and navigation

A plan of a space someone cannot see, produced by the sense they are already navigating with. The lab was built around this problem before it was a product.

Facilities and operations

Existing buildings rarely match their drawings. Units left in a room return what is actually there, at whatever interval the building changes.

Design partners

We are looking for people who measure rooms for a living. Tell us what kind of spaces you work in and we will bring you in early — while the hardware can still be shaped by what you need from it.

Received. We read every request and reply from contact@echovectra.io.

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Research and accessibility partnerships go to contact@echovectra.io.