PS3 Homebrew Developments ?

Not sure. Might be a newer version like Flash 9.

 

Ok thanks.

 

Not really cell-related, but someone has finally got the Sixaxis working wirelessly under Linux. Support for it working in bluetooth-mode isn't natively there, but there's a guide up to getting it working here:

http://www.pabr.org/sixlinux/sixlinux.en.html

These guys used it for a pretty neat demo of Sixaxis wirelessly controlling a robot they are developing, as if it were a puppet (but without strings!). There's a video of that at the link.



I guess for the future, any home-brew apps will be able to take advantage of the motion control in Sixaxis using the same methods as these guys.

 

Fantastic! That looks amazing. Apart from this little bit of awesome engineering they pulled off with the robot, it's also great to see how precise they can control it with the sixaxis. That bodes well - and I can already see a puppet piece of software for the PS3 (or Wii, for that matter, though good graphics for the wires and realistic 'ragdoll' physics should work even better on PS3), working really well.

So like I expected, then, there's bound to be a command required to enable regular readouts from a USB device, though considering how many analog outputs the PS3 controller actually has, who knows. Great to see that Jim Paris is on the job though, as he's an awesome coder and given enough time he'll probably figure it out.

http://ps3.jim.sh/sixaxis/usb/

Anyway, as I expected it seems that if you look at the raw input of the sixaxis usb signal, you can get that signal, which is what these guys are doing here apparently. So maybe I'll try that myself.

 

Now, if only Rag Doll Kung-Fu could be released on the PSN

 

Heh..I'd actually seen the control of LittleBigPlanet's characters referred to as 'puppeteering' in a preview or two. The content creation system in LBP is called 'Poppet' too

 

Great ! Next step is for someone to hook up Cell to Playstation Eye in Linux. Then we should have something even more interesting than Lego Mindstorm NXT. Saliency algorithms can be run to track moving objects in video (or just static image).

 

I wonder if you could already use a regular USB webcam. Although for any application that was aiming for wider usage, I guess specific support of Eye would make sense.

 

You probably could but I don't know if the resolution is good enough actually (even for PS Eye), but I hope so.

Speaking of PS Eye, I think the open source speech recognition engine at CMU would be useful too. Once the Linux side has a few specialized building blocks, I think PS3 homebrew will take off.

I'm also waiting patiently for Nanyang Polytechnic over in Singapore to finish porting the Pixie renderer to Cell (supposed to demo in SIGGRAPH 2007 in August).

 

Good enough for..? You could do object tracking etc. with less than PS Eye offers, unless you're thinking of a specific algorithm that is (particularly) sensitive to resolution.

 

Actualy if it's just "tracking", 18x18 pixel is aparently enough.

Proof: your optical mouse => tracks the movement of the surface (object) under the mouse
Thats really nothing different than (primitive) object tracking - now object recognition would be another matter

 

I just checked the Pixie site again, seems to be using ray tracing. So you're correct, it wouldn't be useful for real-time rendering.

Thanks ! I didn't know that. I have a few applications in mind, but have not done any feasibility study for them yet

EDIT: Hm... Sousuke, you seem to be familiar with object tracking in images/video, do you have some references to introductory material ? Something that gives an overview of the various algorithms ? I know about Scale saliency algorithm but not in depth.

 

I found this (hope it's not old) and didn't know where to put it:

A Rough Guide to Scientific Computing On the PlayStation 3
http://www.netlib.org/utk/people/JackDongarra/PAPERS/scop3.pdf

 

Here!