How Legend Guide builds outdoor guides with Twinbly
Make 3D captures part of your product, with your own interface and workflows.
Legend Guide brings captured places together with maps, climbing routes, points of interest and guides. It uses Twinbly to reconstruct selected captures and retrieve hosted 3D output, then puts that output to work in its own outdoor experience.
Legend Guide is an early Twinbly API integration. The products have founders in common, and the integration has helped shape the practical workflows described here.
A capture becomes part of a place
A useful outdoor guide needs more than a 3D model. A visitor needs to understand where a place is, how to reach it, which route they are looking at and what local knowledge matters.
Legend Guide connects those pieces. Its own map and guide interface can combine a captured scene with surrounding terrain, route information, annotations and editorial content. Twinbly supplies reconstruction and available hosted outputs; Legend Guide decides how those outputs fit the visit.
Explore the published Lone Peak guide or Red Rock Canyon Visitor’s Guide to see the kind of product the team is building. These are complete guides, with their own content and navigation.
From selected footage to a custom map
Legend Guide’s archive workflow selects and prepares footage for reconstruction. Its backend and worker submit that capture to Twinbly, keep the job handle, follow processing and retrieve the available result. The person preparing a guide can continue working while reconstruction runs.
Once a suitable hosted output is ready, Legend Guide brings it into its own map. The integration can load delivered 3D Tiles directly into a Cesium map alongside geographic context. The result is part of Legend Guide’s interface, with its own camera, placement and presentation controls.
The API removes the need to operate the reconstruction service. The application still owns capture selection, its processing decisions, error handling and the experience that surrounds the result. Output formats and conversion readiness vary by job; an application must check what is available before loading it.
Reuse captures in more than one way
Legend Guide does not start every experience from a new processing job. Its capture picker can discover publicly shared Twinbly captures, resolve supported sharing links and show an owner’s connected captures with an appropriate scene-access token.
The team can review a capture, place and align it in a geographic scene, then choose when to publish the guide. Capture permissions and attribution matter throughout that workflow. A read token is not permission to process new footage or publish someone else’s work.
There are two useful presentation choices:
- Embed a published scene. Put a read-only Twinbly viewer into a guide chapter or tour stop, surrounded by the application’s own captions and navigation.
- Use delivered geometry in your own viewer. Load a supported hosted stream into a map or other 3D experience that your application controls. Legend Guide uses this approach for its custom map integration.
A hosted processing result and a published Twinbly scene are distinct. Processing does not automatically create a public sharing page, and an embed does not expose the full editor as an API.
Go back to the photographs
For eligible owned captures, Legend Guide can retrieve retained source images and camera information through Twinbly’s processing API. Its own interface lets an authorized owner select a location, inspect related photographs and use Match view to return to a recorded camera viewpoint.
That makes the reconstruction useful as a way to navigate the capture, as well as a result to view. A guide author can look more closely at a detail in the photographs that contributed to the scene.
Availability depends on retained inputs and the operation’s access restrictions. These images may be extracted video frames or processed reconstruction inputs; they are not guaranteed to be untouched camera originals. This workflow does not grant public access to private source images, and a camera viewpoint does not prove that a detail was unobstructed.
What the API provides, and what the product owns
| Integration need | Twinbly provides | Legend Guide builds |
|---|---|---|
| Turn a capture into 3D | Processing requests, progress and available result links | Capture selection, preparation, job handling and recovery experience |
| Find an existing scene | Permitted public or owner-scoped capture access | The capture picker, review, placement and attribution presentation |
| Deliver an interactive view | Supported hosted assets or a published read-only viewer | The map, camera experience, geographic alignment and surrounding UI |
| Make a useful guide | A scene that can be viewed or embedded | Routes, points of interest, chapters, tour order and publishing workflow |
| Inspect a captured detail | Authorized access to retained images and camera information | Photo selection, review tools and Match view interaction |
The distinction is the opportunity: the same captured place can support a purpose-built guide, listing, inspection report or another product with its own workflow.
Build your own web or native experience
You can use the processing API behind your own web or native application. Your trusted backend holds the processing credential, requests work and retrieves results; your client presents the workflow and uses a renderer that supports the chosen output. Keep processing secrets out of browser bundles and native application binaries.
Your product controls its interface, identity, permissions, customer billing and publishing decisions. Twinbly handles the documented processing and result-delivery operations. This is a foundation for your own experience; it does not make every Twinbly editing tool available through the processing API or supply a turnkey native SDK.
Here are other ways to apply the pattern. These are integration ideas, not additional customer case studies:
- Property listings: connect captures to your own listings, review flow and branded viewing experience.
- Inspections: attach reconstructed scenes to assets, field notes and reports in your existing application.
- Destinations and venues: combine scenes with maps, routes, points of interest and content created by local experts.
Plan the cost before starting
Request a quote for the intended capture before starting paid processing. Show the estimate in your own workflow and make the spending decision explicit. Processing uses the funded Twinbly account associated with the credential; your own customer pricing remains your product’s responsibility.
Quotes are estimates, not guaranteed final charges or spending caps. Capture size, processing choices and available outputs affect the work. Check the current pricing and developer guide rather than relying on a fixed price copied into a case study.
Start with one complete workflow
- Choose the capture input and the experience you want to build around its result.
- Create a processing API key and keep it on your trusted backend. Scene-access tokens are separate read credentials.
- Follow the developer guide: quote, create, upload, start and monitor. Persist the job handle so failures can be reconciled.
- Retrieve the actual available outputs. Choose a compatible viewer or a separate publishing workflow for an embed.
- Connect the result to your own product’s content and permissions, and test the complete experience before offering it to users.
The current API schema is the authority for operations, credentials and limits. Entries marked planned and operations restricted to first-party integrations are not generally available capabilities. A case study shows a working integration pattern; it does not override those access rules.