Glossary
The words, defined
The terms this site uses, each in a few sentences. Where a term is our own, it says so.
The guide
The guide and the AI
- AI guide field.tours term
- The AI agent inside a field.tours tour, on the site also called the host or AI host. It answers questions by text or voice, points at, travels to and lights up named parts of the 3D model, checks what is on screen before it answers "what am I looking at?", and says so when something is not in its material.
- AI agent
- A language model that can act as well as answer. Inside a field.tours tour the agent acts on the 3D scene: it moves the camera, points at and lights up parts of the model, and looks up the place's own material before it answers.
- Character with a body
- In a Custom story the agent can be a character in the scene, with actions the visitor sees it perform: for example SAL-01, the survey drone that is the field guide over the Sálajiegna glacier.
- Grounded answers
- Answers built only from authored, cited material. A field.tours guide shows the source with its answers, and when something is not in its sources it says so instead of guessing.
- Tap to ask
- Tap anything with a name in a tour, and the question about it writes itself.
- Standard tour field.tours term
- A tour built from an organisation's own 3D model and texts, which the organisation manages itself: stops, texts, name tags, sources and the guide's persona are content, not code.
- Custom story field.tours term
- A tour written and built together with field.tours, adding characters with a body, animation, simulation and bespoke interaction to everything a Standard tour has.
Models and scans
The place and its model
- Semantic tagging
- Naming the parts of a 3D model, such as buildings, rooms, details and zones, with authored, sourced descriptions, so software can treat the model as places and things rather than bare geometry. In field.tours every tag is written by the people who know the place; nothing is guessed by an AI from pixels.
- Name tag field.tours term
- One tagged part of a model: its name, a sentence about it and its sources. A single rune can have a name tag, and so can a field of cracks across a whole glacier.
- Digital twin
- A 3D scan or model of an existing place, made by photogrammetry, laser scanning or drone, or taken from BIM and CAD. A field.tours tour adds named parts, sources and an AI guide to it.
- 3D scan
- A 3D model made by measuring a real place. It shows every wall and stone as it is, but on its own it does not know what any of it is.
- Photogrammetry
- Building a 3D model from many overlapping photographs of a place or an object.
- Laser scanning
- Measuring a place with a laser scanner, which records millions of exact positions as a point cloud.
- Point cloud
- A 3D model made of points instead of surfaces: each point is a measured position, often with a colour.
- Gaussian splat
- A way of storing a scanned scene as millions of small, soft, coloured blobs that render near-photographic detail. The field.tours engine can stream splats; the tours shown today use 3D Tiles.
- BIM and IFC
- BIM, building information modelling, is a building's design data; IFC is its open file format. The engine converts such models, and CAD drawings, so that a tour can run on them.
Streaming and screens
Getting a huge model onto every screen
- 3D Tiles
- An open standard from the Open Geospatial Consortium for streaming very large 3D models in pieces, each available at several levels of detail.
- 3D tile streaming
- Cutting a 3D model into tiles at several levels of detail before anyone visits, then sending only the part in view, at the detail the screen can show. A scan far too big to download opens in a browser tab in seconds and keeps sharpening as the visitor moves; one whole site scanned at 2.1 GB opens on about 12 MB.
- Level of detail
- Versions of the same part of a model at different detail. The coarse one is shown from afar and the fine one close up, so the screen only draws what it can show.
- WebGPU
- The newest way for a web page to draw 3D graphics with the device's graphics processor. Standard tours use it where the browser has it, and WebGL elsewhere.
- WebGL
- The established way for a web page to draw 3D graphics, supported by every current browser.
- WebXR
- The web standard for VR and AR headsets. A field.tours tour opens in a headset straight from the browser, with nothing to install.
- Kiosk mode
- A tour running full screen on a touch display in a museum or visitor centre, installed as an app, with nothing else on the screen.