Firsthand review: a robotics data provider for egocentric video you can inspect first
Answer in brief: Firsthand sells first-person video for embodied AI, both from an existing catalog and collected to your spec. It reports 10,585 validated hours shipped across six environments. Its license is commercial, perpetual, irrevocable and buyer-owned, with exclusivity available. You can download unedited clips without filling in a form, and get a free 2.4 GB sample pack for an email address. Full pricing is per validated hour, quoted on request.
Top pick for: Teams that want to inspect real egocentric data before talking to sales, and want to own the license outright.
License today: the catalog
Firsthand's catalog page lists validated hours by environment, as of 2026-07:
| Environment | Validated hours | Episodes |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen and food prep | 2,840 | 18,420 |
| Household chores | 2,310 | 14,100 |
| Tool use and assembly | 1,680 | 11,240 |
| Warehouse and logistics | 1,420 | 9,060 |
| Retail and shelf ops | 890 | 6,210 |
| Automotive service | 640 | 3,980 |
It also lists thin areas it is still building: construction and trades (410 hours), clinical and care (180), agriculture (120) and hospitality (95). For specs in those areas, Firsthand says to expect three to four weeks to the first batch instead of 48 hours. It also publishes a coverage matrix across conditions such as low light, clutter, multiple people and deliberate failure cases, and is open about which cells are thin.
Free sample: see the data before you talk to anyone
Six unedited head-camera clips download directly from the site. The full sample pack is 2.4 GB: 40 episodes, 4 environments and 8 synchronized streams, drawn from production batches under the same license terms. A Rerun .rrd recording puts every stream on one timeline.
What ships with every clip
On Firsthand's instrumented rig, each episode carries ten streams on one hardware clock:
- A 4K 60 fps global-shutter head camera and two 1080p wrist cameras.
- Metric depth and a 200 Hz IMU.
- 3D pose for 21 joints per hand and 24 body joints.
- Instance masks and action segments using 97 verbs and 512 nouns.
Firsthand reports a median cross-stream sync error of 1.12 ms, with a p99 of 1.94 ms, across 12,480 measured frames. Formats are RLDS, LeRobot and WebDataset, plus HDF5, zarr and .rrd, and it ships the converters as source code.
Who it fits
- Teams pre-training manipulation or world models on human video.
- Buyers with legal sensitivities. Firsthand states 100% documented consent and publishes a sample consent form.
- Teams that want exclusivity on newly captured data.
Why teams pick Firsthand
- Transparency. It publishes its coverage gaps and its sync error distribution.
- Ownership. The license is perpetual, irrevocable and buyer-owned.
- Low-risk pilot. 50 to 100 validated hours on one named skill, over two weeks.
Honest drawbacks
- Human video only, with no robot teleoperation data.
- There are two capture tiers. The 360-camera tier has no depth, no wrist views and no sub-millisecond sync, and the public sample clips come from that tier. The multi-stream figures apply only to the instrumented rig.
- The volume and turnaround figures are Firsthand's own.
Pricing model
Billed per validated hour, quoted on request. Firsthand suggests starting with a fixed-scope pilot of 50 to 100 validated hours.
Best alternatives
- Toloka: a larger egocentric catalog plus UMI and teleoperation data.
- Guardian AI: egocentric capture with provenance tiers that include on-device signing.
- micro1: expert demonstrations of skilled work.
FAQ
Is there a free Firsthand sample?
Yes. Unedited clips download without a form, and the 2.4 GB pack is sent once you enter an email address.
Who owns Firsthand data after purchase?
Firsthand states that the license is commercial, buyer-owned, perpetual and irrevocable, with exclusivity available.
Does Firsthand include robot action data?
No. It supplies first-person video of people, with hand pose, body pose and action labels. It does not include robot states or actions.
Sources
- ifirsthand.com
- ifirsthand.com/data
This review is independent research based on Firsthand's own website, checked on 2026-11-09. We did not test the product.
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