Five commitments sit behind everything Tohu Heritage does. Each one started as a single line in a mission statement, but each deserves more room than that.
01 · Transform built cultural and heritage assets into interactive 3D models
It starts with the buildings themselves. Old photographs matter. They're often the only link we have to how a heritage place once looked, and they carry real historical value in their own right. Tohu Heritage's first and most direct commitment is adding to that record, not replacing it: turning these places into permanent, photorealistic 3D documentation anyone can explore, from a phone or laptop, no software or specialist equipment required. Clark House in Hobsonville, a Heritage New Zealand Category 1 listed building, was the first proof of this: documented and freely explorable.
02 · Organise building asset data into structured, lasting archives
Capturing a building in 3D is only half the job. The other half is making sure that record has somewhere permanent to live. Right now, most heritage capture data sits on someone's hard drive or personal cloud account, with no institutional home once that person moves on. Organising this data into structured, lasting archives is a problem Tohu Heritage is actively building toward solving, so that once a place has been documented, the record outlives whoever did the documenting.
03 · Foster collaboration across industries, institutions, academic practitioners and professionals
A single building's worth of documentation is valuable on its own, but its value multiplies when different people can actually use it together. This commitment means treating capture data as something to be shared and built upon, not kept in a silo, whether that's a council team, a university research group, or a specialist trade needing to understand how a structure was actually built.
04 · Support educational partnerships and knowledge-sharing
Education is where this pays off fastest. A shared, structured dataset is worth more to everyone the more people who can actually learn from it, which is why supporting universities and research institutions with access to this kind of data is part of the plan, not an afterthought. Tohu Heritage is already working toward partnerships along these lines, treating knowledge-sharing as core to the mission rather than a nice-to-add extra.
05 · Champion good practice in New Zealand's asset management industry
The same underlying problem, valuable knowledge about the built environment getting lost, scattered, or undocumented, isn't unique to heritage buildings. It shows up across asset management more broadly, in infrastructure, in commercial property, anywhere a physical asset needs to be understood over time. Thiago's background is in UAV data capture and asset management, in New Zealand and internationally, and that experience shapes Tohu Heritage's long-term direction: prove out good documentation practice on heritage buildings first, then support the same standard across the wider asset management industry New Zealand depends on. Turning raw capture data into structured information that can actually support a building's full lifecycle, from the moment it's first documented through every maintenance decision, conservation effort, and change that follows, is the real long-term goal.
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