Choosing an egocentric data vendor

Look for a vendor that records people doing their own jobs during normal operations, not actors or staged tasks, and that processes and checks every episode before delivery. TrueTrace does this: we capture with a calibrated head-mounted stereo camera and IMU in operating factories, logistics stations and retail sites, and deliver each episode with calibration, sync measurements, 3D hand pose, action segments and a QC report.

Broadly, vendors differ in where the footage comes from (people recording at home, staged sessions in a lab or studio, or real work in operating workplaces), in the capture hardware (single camera, stereo, extra wrist or third-person views, gloves or motion capture), and in how much processing and evidence comes with the data. Decide which of these your model needs first; it narrows the list quickly.

Ask for the sync distribution rather than a 'synchronized' claim, a calibration check run against the footage itself, what their 3D hand error figure actually measures, one episode in your target format to run through your own loader, how billable hours will be counted under your caps, who is on camera and why, how privacy is handled, and what the known limitations are.

The 8 checks in detail →

For sync, ask for the per-pair timestamp difference between cameras across a whole recording and look at the 99th percentile, plus frame intervals and IMU gaps. For calibration, rectify sampled frame pairs with the delivered calibration and check that matching points sit on the same image row. We publish both checks and our evaluation sample's results, including a calibration check that failed until the extrinsics were refined.

How each check is computed →

TrueTrace can. You define the tasks, environments, capture hardware and any per-site, per-task or per-operator caps; we return a scene-by-scene plan of billable hours under your rules before anything is committed, then capture, process and deliver in batches. Extra wrist or third-person views can be recorded on the same clock when a project needs them.

Under the buyer's own rules, which usually limit how much the same task at the same site can count. Agree these caps before collection starts and ask the vendor to compute billable hours against them. In our first delivery, 98.0% of the segments the buyer scored were rated valid, and some additional footage still went uncounted because it exceeded the buyer's platform quotas; that is why we now plan against the caps up front.

Enough to run your own checks: synchronized stereo video, IMU, calibration, 3D hand pose, action segments, the raw QC metrics and a SHA256 manifest, under an evaluation-only license. Ours contains all of these; the file-level layout is documented publicly.

Data format reference →

License existing data when its tasks and environments already match what your model is missing; commission collection when you need specific tasks, sites, hardware or caps. TrueTrace offers both, processed and checked the same way, with exclusive or non-exclusive licensing.

Volumes, pricing and schedule are quoted per batch against your specification and your caps, rather than as a list price per hour, because the same footage can count very differently under different buyers' rules.

Three things: footage of real workers in operating workplaces, a calibrated stereo rig with IMU rather than a single camera, and per-episode QC evidence that ships with the data, so you can audit sync, calibration and 3D hands yourself instead of taking them on trust.

Overview →