How to: Get Kinect Working on the PlayStation 3

Kinect has taken the gaming world by storm by enabling motion-controlled gaming on the Xbox 360 without the need for a controller since your body is the controller. But Hyderabad-based Shantanu Goel has managed to get Kinect working on the PS3 and we talk to him in great detail about this unique project.

What made you attempt to make Kinect work on the PS3?

Well, I didn't really have a goal in mind when I started. I just like dabbling in new things and learning about different technologies. I've been interested in image manipulation for some time now, but I don't have a CS background, so learning all the algorithms to do things from scratch was way too much for my time-bound condition. Kinect seemed like a nice platform for the same, with all the open source libraries around it. I saw that everyone was doing hacks with it on the PC already, so I thought, ‘why not try something that no one has thought about?’ Judging by some comments on my Youtube video, it looks like people still don’t believe that it can be done. I had come across a nice project called Sixaxis Emulator or DIYPS3Controller some time back, which can be used to emulate a regular PS3 Dualshock 3 (DS3) controller on a PC. So I put two and two together and created this mash-up.

The future?

What procedure did you use to get Kinect working on the PS3 and what were the components involved in the process?

The program makes use of several other programs in order to provide this functionality. To compile/use it, you also need the following:
1. OpenNI Libraries – To get data from Kinect
2. NITE Libraries – Builds on top of OpenNI to provide gesture detection, etc
3. PrimeSense Libraries for kinect – Kinect drivers to get raw data
4. DIYPS3Controller – The main component for PS3 connection. Also known as Sixaxis Emulator. This emulates a DS3 on the PC and sends the inputs to PS3 through Bluetooth.
5. A Bluetooth dongle capable of custom BT MAC address. Most dongles from CSR with Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR marking should work.

How much technical expertise and monetary expense would it take to get Kinect working on PS3?

If you are looking to do it my way (a PC is used as man-in-the-middle), monetary expense is limited to a cheap Bluetooth dongle worth a couple of hundred Rupees (assuming you already have a PC, Kinect and PS3). Technically, my code is pretty much pick-up-and-go for basic usage, but you need to be familiar with basic compilation stuff. If you want to extend it, then you need to read and understand the (pretty sparse) OpenNI and NITE documentation. You should be pretty conversant with writing C code.



How does the system work? What is the extent of Kinect functionality on the PS3?

My code glues all the components listed above together to get gesture data from Kinect, convert it into DS3 format expected by PS3 on my laptop and then send it to PS3 over Bluetooth through the laptop/Bluetooth dongle. My proof-of-concept code allows you to browse the PS3 menus fluidly, but game control mapping isn't robust yet and a lot is pending there.