Thiago Amaral

From the Field to the platform, and the Long-Term Vision

Thiago Amaral is originally from Brazil, arriving in New Zealand in 2016 and calling it home from that very first year. His journey began in Ranui, a community in West Auckland's Waitākere district, where Rose French, the area's community manager at the time, gave him his first steps into New Zealand culture, the start of a journey he could never have imagined. A long-standing passion for technology, nature, and landscape photography shaped his path early on. His career started in IT, over ten years across systems and technical operations, grounded in a Computer Networks degree from Brazil and a Level 7 Diploma in Computer Science completed in New Zealand, before a shift in 2021 toward UAV technology, where he worked his way up to Chief Pilot and data capture lead. That work took him abroad too, with international experience in asset management data and UAV operations in the UAE, supporting large-scale infrastructure. Along the way he built a strong foundation in surveying and spatial data, the analytical backbone behind every site Tohu documents. He's now based in Auckland, where Tohu Heritage is built and run.

That combination, analytical, technical systems thinking plus hands-on capture experience plus formal spatial-data grounding, is what led to Tohu Heritage: a platform built by someone who has actually flown the missions and processed the data, not just commissioned them.

Thiago's Mission

• Transform built cultural and heritage assets into interactive 3D models
• Organise building asset data into structured, lasting archives
• Foster collaboration across industry, institutions, and academia
• Support educational partnerships and knowledge-sharing
• Champion good practice in New Zealand's asset management industry

Read more on each of these →

Rethinking How We See Spaces

Thiago's focus goes beyond any single heritage site. He's working on how content and asset intelligence come together to change how people experience and manage the spaces around them, from a heritage building the public can explore online, to the underlying systems that help the people responsible for real-world assets actually understand and act on what they're looking at.

What actually drives it is a combination that doesn't often sit in one person: a photographer's eye, a genuine passion for technology and problem solving, and an analytical approach that ties it all together. The photography shows up in how a place is composed and lit so it feels worth exploring, not just accurately measured. The technology and problem-solving instinct shows up in over a decade in IT systems and technical operations, in UAV missions he flew and processed himself rather than commissioned, and in a platform built end to end rather than assembled from outside parts. And the analytical grounding, from formal spatial-data training, is what keeps every capture accurate enough to be trusted, not just good to look at. Every new heritage site runs through all three at once: a problem to solve, a place to see properly, and data that has to hold up.

Tohu Heritage is the public-facing proof of that thinking: photorealistic, interactive 3D documentation, free for anyone to explore. The capture work is done voluntarily, and voluntarily processed and published, so that the record exists whether or not anyone is paying for it. It's the visible half of a broader effort to close the gap between how spaces are captured and how they're actually put to use.

The Platform

Tohu Heritage is New Zealand's first platform for immersive 3D documentation of heritage places. It documents New Zealand's heritage buildings in photorealistic 3D, permanent, freely accessible records that let anyone explore a place in detail, wherever they are. It launched with Clark House in Hobsonville, a Heritage New Zealand Category 1 listed place, and continues to grow in partnership with the councils, heritage institutions, and communities who care for these sites.