The camera never lies

Urban Golf at Home offers launch monitors and home simulator set ups from a number of different manufacturers. But all our products have something in common - they use cameras to track the ball at impact, not radar. Here our founder James Day explains why...

When I started Urban Golf back in 2004, we used infra-red sensors on the ground to measure the clubhead as it approached the ball, using the direction, speed and orientation of the club to project a ball flight. Indoor golf was still in its infancy, but once the novelty of playing indoors started to wear off, the limitations of infra-red technology quickly wore off.

The next generation of sims tracked the ball rather than the club, using either radar or infra-red. We launched Urban Golf with infra-red Full Swing sims, which use three locations between the golfer and the screen to measure ball speed and trajectory. While this offered an improvement on first generation technologies, it still couldn’t measure spin on the golf ball – a critical factor in predicting ball flight.

Developers started to use doplar radar to tackle this issue – a solution that succeeded in outdoor environments where the radar can ‘see’ the whole flight of the ball, but still very limited where the ball is hit into a screen just two metres away. Radar systems cannot accurately measure spin, and cannot be used for putting – two fundamental limitations that we believe will limit the future for operators invested in such platforms.

The rapid emergence of smartphones featuring high-quality cameras has lead to enormous advances in camera technologies, while huge volumes and economies of scale reducing the price of hardware components. Camera-based ball-tracking systems allow us to track the actual behaviour of the ball immediately after impact, including spin - a critical factor in predicting an accurate ball flight.

The honest truth is that a compelling indoor golf experience can only be delivered using camera-based ball tracking. Radar systems (such as Trackman) simply can’t perform to the same level indoors - they can't 'see' putts, delicate pitch shots or full shots with a significant amount of side spin.

We have relationships with technology firms all over the world, but they all have one thing in common - they use camera-based ball tracking to offer the most accurate indoor golf experience possible.