About the "Kinect-PS3" project

The Kinect-PS3 project from Shantanu Goel makes some huge buzz on the web. The Kinect-PS3 uses -among others things- the sixaxis emulator (called “diyps3controller” everywhere because of the name of my googlecode page), and probably wouldn’t be there without it. Many websites are talking about the Kinect-PS3, and they only give credits to only one person… guess who. This is not very fair, and I really would have appreciated getting a few credits for what I am working on.

That said, the Kinect-PS3 is a great showcase for the sixaxis emulator, and my googlecode page and blog are currently receiving an unusual amount of visitors.

I guess Sony will not enjoy this stuff at all, and I hope they won’t try to break the compatibility with the sixaxis emulator. But if they try to, be sure I will do my best to fix it.

15 Replies to “About the "Kinect-PS3" project”

  1. Well, it's always the others who takes the credit.
    I really dont see how Sony should try to break the comms you've done, it's "the same" as the controller.
    The only thing they could change it with, is the mouse movements, as it's quite faster than the controller.

    I appreciate your work, nicely done.

    Regards,
    Lerche

  2. Hi Matlo

    I'm sorry they didn't give the credit to you. I listed your project name and link in bold and have mentioned the same in readme for the project on github as well. Plus gave it to all the editors who mailed me to get more info specifically telling them that it is a mashup of these things and on its own doesn't have much of a capability but still they seem hellbent on using the word hack to get more views even though I haven't mentioned "hack" anywhere in my post at all and always said it is a "mashup" of other projects. 🙁

  3. Hi Shantanu,

    I like your project, and I think you are doing a great work, no doubt about that. I may give it a try someday. I hope Microsoft will update the kinect to lower the latency.

    I guess you could have prevent people from writing nonsense by giving more details and explaining what's the purpose of each piece of software.

  4. haha, as soon as i saw the news i knew it was using this as i was just fiddling with it a few days ago. keep up the good work matlo, i'll let others know of your project too.

    that being said, i would like to see some changes in the way mouse actions are translated to movements. Currently, mouse movements are translated to analog stick movements, then the game takes those stick movements and move the character. i hope i'm correct in assuming that fact.

    but thats not how a mouse moves in PC games. say, for example, your mouse moves from point A to point B that is 5cm away in 1 second. then its velocity in that displacement is 5cm/sec. i think sixaxis emu should calculate/extrapolate mouse's instantaneous velocity, then tell the stick to be a certain distance from the neutral position that corresponds to the mouse speed to achieve 1:1 movement from the mouse to the game.

    of course, this depands on the game, and since different games uses different movement profiles for the analog sticks, there needs to be some way to record that profile, but i believe this will make FPS on PS3 a true PC experience.

    hopefully that made sense…

  5. I think I understand what you mean (tell me if I'm not).

    The velocity should be computed taking into account the mouse report timestamps.

    The sixaxis emulator currently approximates the velocity from the mouse report average over 10ms (=the sixaxis report period) without considering timestamps: for ex, if it receives N mouse reports, it assumes a constant 10/N ms period.

    There is no easy way to change that, since the SDL library is not providing timestamps. But I'm currently working on a custom SDL to enable multiple mice & keyboards, and I know it's possible to add timestamp information into events.

  6. Great, thanks.

    A few words about the Linux requirement would also have prevented people from writing it requires windows 😀

  7. Yeah.. I actually have specifically mentioned linux requirement on github cuz I thought that I'll keep the main article short and anyone wanting to try it out will at least read the readme with the source code. But after reading through all the articles and comments (especially on youtube), I'm convinced that no one wants to actually read anything. They just watch a few seconds of the video by fast forwarding through it and form their own opinion about it, no matter what is written below it lol 😀

  8. great mass publicity which will create a back lash against some people who may abuse it (although that is a far fetched opinion of those who think mouse vs controller is unfair). This may not end well especially with a mixture of a very popular piece of hardware being used on a competing console.

    I suggest you hide or remove or rename the project else it gets messed up or patched out and all the hard work is gone.

  9. I don't care about people thinking using the sixaxis emulator is cheating. I think it's up to the user to choose its own controller. Some commercial products already give the ability to use different controllers.

    The goal of the sixaxis emulator is to give people the choice of the controller: mouse, keyboard, joysticks, camera, microphone, etc… Even hardware from a competing console. The xbox360 pad already works.

    Hiding is a nonsense, the sixaxis emulator is free, it's open-source. Anyone can copy or modify it as long as it comply to the GPL license.

  10. I respect your decision, and hope for the best. It is great what you have done here, and I am grateful for the hard work.

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