Firsthand vs EgoDex

Short answer

EgoDex is a research egocentric dataset with high-quality 3D hand pose, but it is licensed CC BY-NC-ND, which rules out commercial training use [VERIFY]. Firsthand delivers comparable pose plus depth and action segments under a perpetual, buyer-owned commercial license.

Side by side

Firsthand vs EgoDex, dimension by dimension.

Dimension	Firsthand	EgoDex
Hours	Custom to your spec; 10,585 validated hours across the current catalog	Research-scale [VERIFY]
Capture setup	Head + two wrist cameras, active-stereo depth, 3× IMU, hardware-triggered on one PTP clock	Head-mounted capture optimized for hand tracking [VERIFY]
Streams	Ten synchronized streams incl. depth, IMU, 3D hand & body pose, segmentation, action segments	RGB + high-quality 3D hand pose [VERIFY]
Sync	Hardware-triggered; median 1.12 ms, 2.0 ms ceiling, drift written to metadata	Not specified as sub-2 ms hardware sync [VERIFY]
Hand pose	3D, handJoints[2][21][3], metric, in the head-camera frame	Strong 3D hand pose
Depth	Metric depth, 848×480 at 30 Hz, with per-pixel confidence	Not a universal metric depth stream [VERIFY]
Action labels	Frame-accurate action segments (verb, noun, ns timestamps)	Task/annotation scheme per the dataset release [VERIFY]
Failure-case coverage	Transit, occlusion and low-light shipped — not trimmed — with a published reject log	Research capture, not curated to a buyer skill spec
License	Perpetual, irrevocable, buyer-owned commercial license	CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 [VERIFY]
Commercial use allowed	Yes	No — non-commercial, no-derivatives
Consent documentation	Written release per participant; consent artefacts + data card per batch	Per the dataset release [VERIFY]
Delivery formats	RLDS, LeRobot, WebDataset, HDF5, zarr, Rerun .rrd	Research distribution format [VERIFY]
Cost	Per validated hour, quoted per engagement; free sample pack, no form	Free for non-commercial research

Third-party figures marked [VERIFY] are confirmed against the sources below before publishing. Firsthand figures are measured on-site.

When EgoDex is the right choice

Non-commercial academic research on hand pose or imitation learning.
You need a public hand-pose benchmark and can accept the no-derivatives terms.

When Firsthand is the right choice

You are training a commercial product and cannot use a non-commercial license.
You need hand pose plus synchronized metric depth and action segments.
You need to own the data and modify or redistribute derived models freely.

FAQ

Common questions.

Can I train a commercial model on EgoDex?

No, if it is licensed CC BY-NC-ND [VERIFY] — that license prohibits commercial use and derivative works. For commercial training you need commercially-licensed data such as Firsthand.

Is Firsthand hand pose as good as EgoDex?

Firsthand ships 3D hand pose as handJoints[2][21][3] in metric units in the head-camera frame, alongside depth and action segments, under a commercial license. Evaluate both on the free sample pack against your task.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

Sources

EgoDex dataset page [VERIFY]
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

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