Aside.ai

Hardware

Inspiration

Wearables today either surveil you (cameras, trackers) or quantify you (steps, sleep, heart rate). None of them are fun. We kept joking that everyone deserves "main-character energy" — a narrator who makes your boring Tuesday sound legendary. So we asked: what if a wearable didn't record your life or coach you through it, but performed it back to you in real time? Walk into a room and get announced like a champion. Trip over a chair and hear a goth mommy gently fuss over you. That idea was too funny not to build.

What it does

Aside is a clip-on camera + mic that watches the world around you and narrates it out loud in real time in a personality you choose. The same moment becomes wildly different depending on the vibe:

Hype Man: "AYO they're BACK and they brought the FUEL, let's GOOO!" female therapist: "Look at you, my little raven returning with your potion of warmth." Epic Quest Narrator: "Lo! The hero returns from the Bean Mines, sacred elixir in hand."

How we built it

Three machines, three jobs:

Eyes: Raspberry Pi (QNX): captures camera frames and streams them over Wi-Fi.

Brain: Laptop (Python): the orchestrator. It sends each frame to Claude Haiku 4.5 vision, which acts as both eyes and brain — looking at the image and writing one short in-character line in a single call. Deepgram handles speech-to-text (ears) and text-to-speech (voice), and Redis stores memory + which personality is active.

Voice: Phone (React Native / Expo): the personality switcher and live feed that plays the narration.

Challenges we ran into

Our first "eyes" didn't pan out. We planned to use a dedicated vision service; it fell through. We pivoted to sending frames straight to Claude which turned out simpler and better.

QNX is unforgiving. MediaPipe (our planned on-device detector) doesn't build on QNX, and writing native C++ camera capture was slow. We found a pragmatic path using QNX's built-in viewfinder + screenshot tools to grab JPEGs from Python.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It actually works end-to-end, live: Pi camera → laptop → Claude → voice → phone, in ~1–2 seconds. The narration is genuinely funny and stays in character — and the voice changes with the personality. Swappable personalities on the fly, with the AI remembering and calling back to earlier moments. We turned a stack of "this doesn't work on QNX" problems into a clean, modular system and shipped real engineering (change-gating, color correction, a custom Pi↔laptop protocol) under hackathon time pressure.