Joaquim Rocha
Published on

Playing GTA V on a PS3 with Leap Motion

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Joaquim Rocha
    Twitter
  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

I have a PlayStation 3 and I love working with new types of user input so, as my last hack of the year, I wanted to use the Leap Motion Controller to play some game on the PS3. The Leap Motion Controller is obviously not compatible with the PS3 so the plan was to use a regular computer, interpret the gestures from the Leap Motion, and send the respective controls to the console.

For the game, I chose GTA V because it involves many different actions such as running, jumping, driving or shooting… and it’s awesome!.

Here is the video of yours truly using this script to do some disastrous driving but having a lot of fun with the Leap Motion and GTA V:

The reason why the big video has such a low quality and the tiny one is fine is that they were recorded with my Nexus 5 and my Canon S95, respectively, and my living room was very dark.

How it works

As seen in the video, it is also possible to control the PS3 menu and choose the game from there. The player’s actions I chose to implement were walking, running, jumping, driving and enter/leaving a vehicle. All of those were easy to implement except for the driving. The thing is that I can easily get the angle for the imaginary steering wheel that a user does with the Leap Motion device but I could only simulate turning the left analog stick fully to the left or to the right. This makes it kind of difficult to steer a car, as can be seen in the video, but it’s still fun to do it.

For the communication with the PS3, it uses the GIMX project which makes it possible to simulate a SixAxis game pad from a computer and send its actions over bluetooth to the PS3. GIMX has some nice utilities, being its main one the emuclient which detects key events and uses a configuration file to map them to the actions of the SixAxis. It would be much more elegant to send the commands to the PS3 directly from the script I wrote but it was simply faster to instead simulate the key events and let GIMX do the rest with the right configuration file.

As with the Leap GNOME Controller, this is a small script rather than a big project. To know how to use the project, please refer to the README file that ships with it. Hopefully someone will like to try it out and improve the current gestures or make new ones.

Get the source at GitHub and have a great 2014!