Egocentric Woodturning and Lathe Data

Egocentric woodturning and lathe data is first-person video of one person shaping wood on a lathe, recorded from that person’s own point of view while they work. A paid, consented contributor wears the capture rig and performs the task written in a skill spec, and each attempt is delivered as an episode with synchronized streams, hand pose and labeled action segments. It is human capture. It is not robot or teleoperation data, and it is not a fixed corpus you download.

The site states the task in its commercial task catalog. In the Woodcraft & Carving Studio environment, the row "Woodturning" reads: "Mount a blank on the lathe and shape it with turning tools as it spins." It is rated Hard, captured with a head-mounted phone or a multiview rig, and listed as available on request. The environment is described with examples of woodturning, wood carving, marquetry, furniture crafting and whittling. A search of the catalog finds no other row that names a lathe. This page is built on that one row and on nothing else the site says about turning.

Neighbouring pages cover different subjects. Egocentric wood carving data covers shaping wood by hand with chisels, gouges and knives, and egocentric woodworking and carpentry data spans measuring, sawing, drilling, joining, sanding and finishing wood. Egocentric sanding and finishing data centres on repeated passes over a surface. The subject here is the lathe, where the blank spins and the turning tool shapes it.

People reach this topic through woodturning robot training data, a wood lathe video dataset, egocentric spindle and bowl turning data, or custom craft-studio data collection. They describe one request from different angles. The site’s row names neither spindles nor bowls, so which form to turn is a spec decision. The work is the same: write the task down, collect it on demand, and receive validated episodes.

The first table below reproduces the five catalog rows of the Woodcraft & Carving Studio environment, plus one row from another studio that shapes a spinning material. "Woodturning" is the subject of this page. The other four studio rows, "Wood carving", "Whittling", "Marquetry" and "Furniture crafting", are different sequences and are listed for context only. The "Wheel throwing" row, in the Pottery & Ceramics Studio, centres, opens and pulls clay on a wheel. It is a separate listing and this page does not claim it.

The woodturning row names two actions, mount and shape. The site does not say what is turned, which turning tools an episode uses, or what the finished piece looks like. It states no wood species, blank size, form such as a spindle or a bowl, lathe model or number of passes. Whether one episode is mounting the blank, one shaping stage or the whole piece is a spec decision.

The row is listed as available on request and carries the head-mounted phone or multiview rig capture setup. It is not listed as ready to deploy or as an active collection, so expect a scoping step before capture starts.

Each attempt is delivered as one episode, and turning needs a decision up front about what one attempt is. It could be mounting the blank, one shaping stage, or the whole piece from blank to turned form. The site does not set an episode length, the size of the piece or the number of episodes, so the skill spec does. Inside the episode, the synchronized streams run from start to end, and action segments divide it into labeled spans.

The choice matters because of two machine-checked rules. An episode is rejected if the manipulated object is out of frame for more than 15 percent of it, and if more than 35 percent of depth pixels in the manipulation region are invalid. At a lathe the blank, the tool and the hands are all close to the camera, so the spec should say what counts as the manipulated object and where the manipulation region is at each step. The site also states that depth degrades on wet and reflective surfaces, and does not say how it behaves on a spinning wooden blank.

The site does not describe how a spinning workpiece, fast-moving tool or loose shavings are handled. If your policy depends on any of those, say so at the start, and settle it in a Spec Pilot rather than assuming it.

Inside each episode, action segments divide the recording into start- and end-timestamped spans, each carrying start_ns, end_ns, verb and noun. For this task family a segment can be one step as written in the skill spec, so a turning session becomes a run of labeled steps rather than one long clip. The other standard fields are hand_joints and hand_visible for 3D hand pose, contact_events for the moment the hand meets an object, objects, and instance_masks, stored at the depth resolution of 848×480 so they line up with the depth stream.

Hand pose is delivered for both hands with a per-joint visibility flag for occluded fingers. That is the label that carries how the hands hold and move the turning tool, and it is the main signal for the manipulation inside a turning task. The site describes contact events as the moment the hand meets an item, and does not say which contacts matter at a lathe, so the spec settles what a contact event means for your task.

The site lists no label for the outcome of the turning. There is no stated wood species, tool type, lathe speed, cut depth, dimension, surface quality, finish label or task-completion score, and no contact force reading. Camera pose, a head trajectory and a map of the workspace are likewise not among the listed deliverables. The site states 6-DoF IMU data at 200 Hz from head- and wrist-mounted sensors, and nothing more about motion.

Delivery is in the format your stack already reads: RLDS, LeRobot, WebDataset, HDF5, zarr or Rerun .rrd, or raw streams with metadata. Readable converter source ships alongside the data so the schema can be retargeted to your own loader. The official documentation for three of these formats is linked in the sources below. Collections are billed per validated hour, and the license is perpetual, irrevocable and worldwide, buyer-owned and non-exclusive by default, with exclusivity available as a separate term.

A published robot foundation model paper, GR00T N1, linked in the sources below, describes a data pyramid with web data and human video at the base, synthetic data in the middle and real robot trajectories at the top. First-person human video of hand work sits in that base layer. Human capture does not replace robot data, and this page does not claim that it does. The glossary entry on the data pyramid explains how the layers trade volume for embodiment closeness.

Turning is a useful shape of task because the work is in the hands and the tool. The site’s tool use page says that tool selection, grip changes and tool hand-off between hands live in finger-level detail that RGB video alone cannot resolve, and that each needs 3D hand pose tracked through reach, grasp and tool manipulation. That page is about driving and fastening tools, not turning tools, so this page does not claim the same findings for a lathe. What carries over is the reasoning: a clip that shows a blank somewhere in frame does not carry what a policy needs. The hands, the tool and the step boundaries have to be in the episode.

A custom collection lets you aim at the step your model is missing, such as mounting a blank versus shaping it, or a specific tool in a specific grip. This page does not claim that any public corpus lacks turning data, and it does not claim a training outcome or a model improvement from any dataset.

The tradeoff to plan for is the embodiment gap between a human pair of hands at a lathe and a robot platform doing the same, which retargeting or pairing with robot data has to close. Counts of contributors, hours and tasks are set in your skill spec.

The site describes the capture setup for this row: a head-mounted phone records the first-person view of real work on site, and a multiview rig adds synchronized third-person angles when the spec asks for them. The handheld-gripper setup, which the site describes as a staged working set, is not the setup listed for the woodturning row. The status "available on request" means the work is scoped and recruited to spec when a buyer asks for it.

The site names no studio, school, workshop, city or region, and it lists capture at your own facility as not offered. This page therefore makes no claim that episodes are recorded in a particular studio, and none that they are recorded at yours. Capture is run to your skill spec using the settings and contributors Firsthand arranges.

Every contributor signs a written release before capture, and each delivered episode links to that record through consent artefact IDs in the batch data card. The consent chain has six checkpoints, from before capture to after delivery, and a break at any one discards the footage rather than shipping it at a lower grade. At ingest, automated detection finds faces, plates and screens and blurs them irreversibly, and speech is scrubbed of names, addresses and card numbers while ambient audio is kept. A human reviewer confirms that no un-consented person is identifiable in any frame, and footage that cannot be de-identified is discarded. An undocumented bystander is also one of the machine-checked reject criteria. The anonymization record is delivered with the data.

On safety and qualification, the site states no contributor safety protocol, no lathe speed, no tool-safety or injury-prevention guidance and no certification for the woodturning row, and this page describes none. If your program needs terms about who performs the work or the conditions under which it is done, raise them when you scope it. None of this is legal advice, and the executed agreement controls.

From signed spec to first validated batch, the site states a median of 48 hours where coverage is deep and three to four weeks where it is thin and contributors need to be recruited first. The site does not say whether the Woodcraft & Carving Studio environment counts as deep or thin, and its rows are available on request, so ask which timeline applies when you request the quote. Speed comes from a warm pipeline, not from cutting consent, review or anonymization.

The site also states program milestones: a pilot reaches its first delivery in two to three weeks, and a standing program reaches full rate in four to six weeks. After the first batch, on-demand top-ups run against the same accept criteria, so you can add blanks, steps or tools without rewriting the spec. The site does not state a turnaround for those later batches, so plan them in your quote.

Only footage that clears the signed accept criteria is billed as a validated hour, and rejected items are recaptured at our cost. The site does not publish a price list, a minimum order or a batch size for this task family, so those are set in your quote. Collection is fast and on demand in the sense that you do not need a standing program: a focused brief is a normal starting point.

Where this site does not state something, this page says "Not stated" rather than filling the gap. The tables below separate what is delivered from what is not stated. There is no listed label for wood species, turned form, lathe speed, cut depth, surface quality or completion, no tool specification beyond turning tools, no task duration, no site count, no region or city, no episode count and no success or quality label. Nothing here reports a robot result, a benchmark or a model improvement.

Counts of contributors, hours and tasks are set in your skill spec. A task outside the row quoted above, such as a turning technique the catalog does not name, is settled in a Spec Pilot rather than assumed.

Describe the step, the tool, the blank and the variation or failure cases your pipeline is missing. That becomes a written skill spec, quoted for reach, timeline and price before any capture begins, and most programs run a Spec Pilot first, a small, fast first batch that proves the spec and the accept criteria on real footage before volume scales. The scoping checklist below maps the parts of a skill spec onto a turning request. A published sample recording is on the sample data outputs page if you want to see the streams before you write a spec.

Three choices matter most for this family. Name the step and the tool rather than a broad activity, because that is what lets each step become one action segment. Name the form you want turned, since the row names none. And name where the episode starts and stops: mounting the blank, one stage or the whole piece, since the site does not set an episode length.