Acoustic talker direction finders have potential applications to camera pointing for teleconferencing and to microphone array beam steering for audio communication and voice processing systems. This paper describes a laboratory setup and computer interface that was developed for testing talker direction finder algorithms in the Bell Labs Varechoic chamber, a room with computer-controlled absorbing panels. The procedure exploits the full capability of the facility by automatically stepping through a sequence of room panel configurations, outputting a digital speech signal, running the processor, and collecting the data. The advantage of this technique is that it allows for testing under a multitude of different acoustic conditions in the same physical location, thereby enabling a general characterization of the algorithm under evaluation. As an example of the technique, we have implemented the Fischell–Coker talker direction finder algorithm using real-time C-code running on an SGI workstation, which is the same machine that is used to orchestrate the automatic testing procedure.