Abstract: An acoustic many-to-many localization, communication and management system serving a group whose members are moving or maneuvering, the system comprising plural portable hardware devices which may be distributed to plural group members respectively, each device including at least one array of speakers and/or at least one array of microphones, and/or at least one hardware processor, some or all typically co-located. Typically, the hardware processor in at least one device d1 from among the devices controls d1's speaker to at least once broadcast a first signal (e.g. “localization request signal”) at a time t_zero. Typically the hardware processor in device d1 at least once computes at least one of angle and distance between d2 and d1, to monitor locations of other group members who may be on the move.

Abstract: Apparatus for data communications includes a modem front end, which processes an incoming signal so as to generate a stream of incoming digitized samples, and which processes outgoing digital samples to generate an outgoing signal. A primary client receives and processes the incoming digitized samples from the front end, and conveys the information extracted from the samples to a secondary client. The primary client also receives and processes outgoing data from the secondary client in order to generate the outgoing digital samples for the front end. The front end and clients are connected by a switch, which toggles between a first position in which it passes the incoming digitized samples from the modem front end to an input of the primary client, and a second position in which the switch passes the outgoing data from the secondary client to the input of the primary client.

Abstract: A complete multi-user game playing environment is described which provides game playing services to cable television subscribers over existing cable networks. A game player located at the end of a cable network connection has a computer or other game playing device attached to the cable network through a front end adapter card. A game playing server is located at the cable headend and is equipped with back end communications cards for full duplex communications over the cable network with a plurality of game players. A plurality of uplink frequencies are used by the servers to communicate with the game players and a pluralities of downlink frequencies are used to communicate from the game players to the server. The communications are controlled by the server to prevent communication collision on the cable network over the same frequencies by having the server control a dynamically-changing time and frequency division multiple access protocol.