We present Ego-OSCAR, an open-hardware, low-cost, head-mounted stereo-inertial capture device for egocentric data collection in the wild. EgoOSCAR pairs a hardware-synchronized global-shutter stereo camera with a 6- axis IMU, an embedded Linux SBC for on-device video encoding, and a realtime microcontroller for user feedback and watchdog functions. The complete bill of materials is under USD 200 per unit, using only commercially available components and 3D-printed parts. Alongside the device, we release a complete software stack (hardware-accelerated recording pipeline, IMU sampling daemon, time-synchronization tooling, and watchdog firmware) and roughly 550 hours of egocentric stereo video per camera with synchronized IMU, collected by a distributed contributor network across everyday indoor environments. The release is annotated rather than raw: free-form action captions cover essentially the entire recorded timeline with an open vocabulary, and per-frame 3D hand reconstructions ship alongside per-session stereo calibration. Ego-OSCAR does not aim to match the per-unit fidelity of research-grade systems such as Project Aria; it aims to be the cheapest defensible substrate for crowdsourced egocentric capture, and to lower the activation energy for any team that wants to collect egocentric data at scale. All hardware designs, software, and the dataset are open-sourced
Pietro Bonazzi, Julian Moosmann, Ahmet Celik +2cs.CV
Smart eyewear enables unobtrusive, context-aware interaction through multimodal sensors and on-device intelligence, but is severely limited by power, memory, and compute constraints in a compact form factor. Open-hardware platforms supporting event-based vision and embedded ML at this scale are rare. This work introduces an open-source smart glasses platform for rapid prototyping of novel sensors and algorithms. Its modular design uses a flexible FPC interposer to support both event-based and frame-based cameras without full PCB redesign. A hardware-software co-designed power management system combines a configurable PMIC with event-driven wake-up via an nRF5340 coordinator, keeping the GAP9 RISC-V SoC powered down between inferences. The prototype achieves up to 11.5 hours of continuous on-device ML from a 200 mAh battery. As a demonstration, an egocentric hand gesture recognition pipeline was evaluated on the LynX dataset using polarity-separated event histograms from a Prophesee GENX320 camera. R(2+1)D achieved the best cross-subject accuracy of 83.94\% (macro F1 = 0.781) under leave-two-subjects-out validation, with 78.3 ms end-to-end inference latency on the GAP9. Temporal augmentation and removal of ambiguous classes provided the largest gains (+8.9 pp). All hardware designs, firmware, and models are released open source.