HERMES WATCH

How a Watch clip enters the Hermes corpus →

V3.9 · BETA · UNPAIRED / LOCAL-ONLY

Hermes Watch is the watch-the-sky companion to Hermes. A Chrome extension that captures live video streams or screen regions, runs frame analysis locally, and produces evidence packages — short clips bundled with case files — that Hermes can later grade. It is the front end of the same investigation philosophy: the U becomes an I through evidence, not assumption.

If you are on the beta tester list

Install V3.9.

One zip. Loads as an unpacked Chrome extension. No account, no upload, no cloud — V3.9 is local-only by default. You watch a feed, the extension keeps the interesting seconds, and you decide what to send back.

Download hermes-watch-ready.zip → How to install it

<FILECOUNT> files · <BYTES> bytes · Chrome 116+ · Windows / macOS / Linux desktop.
Nothing leaves your machine until you explicitly export. No background telemetry.

If you analyze this phenomenon

What V3.9 actually is.

V3.9 ships with two analyzers. The default for fresh installs is small-bright-mover — a tracking analyzer tuned for distant aerial targets: small, bright, high-contrast objects moving smoothly across frames. It runs a luminance pass, local-mean contrast comparison, connected-component blob extraction, size filtering (rejects cursors and large camera moves), and greedy nearest-neighbor tracking across frames. Tracks are scored on length, total distance traveled, and trajectory smoothness. The legacy motion-stub analyzer (frame differencing — fires on any change) is still selectable in the options page for users who want the V1 behavior. Mask drawing lets you mark chyrons, station logos, score tickers, and other recurring on-screen elements as ignore-regions, persisted per source. The rest of the pipeline is the same point it always was: region selection, rolling pre-trigger buffer, in-frame clock burned into captured frames, canonical filename schema, MP4 uuid-box watermark, thumbnail LSB watermark, IndexedDB storage, cases browser, options page. Pairing crypto (HMAC-SHA-256 submitter tags and watermark payloads) is wired locally; the upload exchange itself is still disabled.

  • Buildhermes-watch-ready.zip
  • Files<FILECOUNT>
  • Size<BYTES> bytes
  • SHA-256<SHA256_PLACEHOLDER>
  • Analyzersmall-bright-mover (motion-stub fallback)
  • Pairingwired locally, upload disabled in V3.9

What’s new in V3.9

What Hermes Watch is

An evidence-producing front end. You point it at a livestream or screen region and it produces clips bundled with case metadata.

A rolling-buffer recorder. Events capture the seconds before the trigger, not just after.

Local-only by default. Cases live in IndexedDB on your machine until you choose to export them as JSON.

What Hermes Watch is not (yet)

Not a guaranteed UAP detector. small-bright-mover is a real tracking analyzer, not a vision model — it’ll surface anything small, bright, and moving smoothly through your region: aircraft, satellites, birds at distance, pixel artifacts on noisy streams. Use mask drawing to suppress recurring on-screen elements (logos, tickers, chyrons), and tighten the region to the sky portion of the feed. The CNN/vision-model analyzer lands later.

Not paired to your Hermes account. The pairing crypto plumbing (submitter tags, watermark payloads) is implemented, but the upload exchange and the Pair button are disabled until a future release.

Not a mobile build. Desktop Chrome 116+ only.

Install

  1. Download hermes-watch-ready.zip from the button above.
  2. Extract it. The extracted folder contains manifest.json at its root.
  3. In Chrome, open chrome://extensions/.
  4. Toggle Developer mode on (top-right).
  5. Click Load unpacked.
  6. Select the extracted hermes-watch folder — the one containing manifest.json.

Verify (optional)

SHA-256 of the zip:

<SHA256_PLACEHOLDER>

Windows (PowerShell):

Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 .\hermes-watch-ready.zip

macOS / Linux:

shasum -a 256 hermes-watch-ready.zip

Run it

  1. Click the Hermes Watch icon in the Chrome toolbar.
  2. Click Start Watching.
  3. Pick a source — screen, window, or tab.
  4. (optional) After confirming your region, drag rectangles inside it to mask any on-screen overlays you want the analyzer to ignore — station logos, lower-thirds, scoreboards, score tickers. Skip the mask phase if the captured area is just sky. Masks are saved per source and reused next time you watch the same region.
  5. Let it run. Cases accumulate in the cases page.
V3.9 note — small-bright-mover still surfaces real-world movers. small-bright-mover filters size, distance, and trajectory smoothness, but it will still surface aircraft, satellites, and distant birds moving cleanly across your region. Use mask drawing to suppress recurring on-screen elements, and narrow the region to the sky portion of the feed. The CNN/vision-model layer lands later.

Privacy contract

Hermes Watch only captures what you pick during the source-selection dialog. No background telemetry. No auto-uploads. Cases live on your machine.

From the options page you can Export all cases (JSON) for a batch send, or Clear all local cases to wipe IndexedDB.

V3.9 also requests notifications permission (for the new-case desktop notification, which is toggleable in options) and <all_urls> host permission (so the region-selection overlay, in-frame clock, and case banner can render in the watched tab).

Roadmap

Partially shipped in V3.9: small-bright-mover lands the tracking foundation; the CNN/vision-model analyzer layer is still future.

Crypto plumbing shipped in V3.9; upload exchange still future: Hermes account pairing and a signed upload pipeline back to the corpus.

ADS-B and weather correlation overlays — the upstream API stack is already wired into the Hermes investigation pipeline.

DCT-domain video watermarking for stronger evidence provenance.

No promises on dates. V3.9 is the foothold.