Tim Brown is the Lead for Digital Innovation for the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility.
He works at the intersection of science, data management, data visualisation, VR and AR.
Tim leads the technical implementation team for the Australian Scalable Drone Cloud (ASDC) project to create a national infrastructure drone platform for research, to provide an intuitive online visualisation platform and link these types of 3D geospatial into a VR/AR and Digital Twin platform built in the Unreal Engine game engine software.
Tim has a PhD from the University of Utah (USA), in complexity theory and modelling of self-organised swarming behaviour in New World army ants. Tim’s current work focuses on developing open source hardware and software pipelines for enabling high throughput phenotyping, high resolution monitoring and visualisation of environmental and research data.
In 2014 he led the development of EcoVR, a Digital Twin of the national arboretum using real research data. This was one of the first Digital Twin projects in the world to use game engine software to model a field research site and visualise environmental data in VR. Tim is currently a PI on the Australian Scalable Drone Cloud (ASDC) project to create an open source national platform for drone data in Australia.