Winter can be rough on your psyche if you’re an avid golfer living north of the Sun Belt and spending most of the season at home. With snow or cold temperatures keeping you off the local courses, you might fear that your skills are withering away while friends in warmer climates continue to improve theirs year-round. But now with the advent of high-quality golf simulators, you can work on your game every day of the year almost anywhere you please, and do so while playing some of the most beautiful and most challenging courses in the world.
A basic simulator consists of a large screen and tracking devices that calculate the ball’s trajectory from your clubface to the screen. From this path, software determines where the ball would land and displays an image of that landing. The best simulators employ lifelike images to make you feel as though you’re on the course, and they provide instant feedback about every swing you take, revealing the length of the drive, the remaining distance to the pin, and your club speed. They also offer more technical information, like the angle of your clubface when it strikes the ball. In an instant, the video brings you to the ball, where you take another shot. In this way, simulators help to concentrate the learning and playing process. Instead of spending four to five hours walking a course, you can complete 18 holes in an hour, leaving plenty of time for another round of golf.
Brett Kist, PGA general manager at the Cliffs at Keowee Vineyards in South Carolina, is among the golf pros who agree that having specific and instant feedback about each shot can improve your game. "If your simulator can tell you that your clubface is two degrees open when you feel that your swing is perfect, you’ll know right away that it’s not," says Kist.
Still, professional golfers point out that even the best simulators can’t replicate every condition of the game. "Some of our avid golfers who have simulators say that they are better players indoors than outdoors," says Charles McLendon, master fitting professional at Reynolds Plantation in Georgia. "With a simulator you don’t practice different lies. You are always playing from a flat surface," he says, noting that simulators also can’t teach golfers how to react to wind and other weather conditions.
But what simulators such as the following three can do extremely well is make the winter months fly by while you practice the game you love.
Sights and Sounds
High Definition Golf bills itself as the company that offers the most realistic golfing experience from a simulator. The world’s famous courses are rendered in HD—with surround sound, so that the crashing of waves, the howling of the wind, and even the polite applause or roars from the crowd accompany you through the course. The technology uses topographical mapping technology paired with video taken at the courses to create a lifelike moving picture of each position on the course. "This is not an imitation of these courses; it’s built from HD video that we’ve taken," says Bob Beecroft, vice president of sales for High Definition Golf.
The system offers an array of data about every swing you take, including the position of the clubface, the angle of attack, and every calculation about where the ball would land based on its spin and trajectory. The system also offers a video swing analysis, which allows you to view a video of your swing in order to make adjustments. In addition, you can send live streaming video and audio of your swing over the Internet to your favorite golf pro for a remote lesson, or you can use the Internet connection to play against another golfer in another location.
This simulator is a sizable investment at $39,500, and it requires quite a bit of space as well: a 9-by-12-foot room to accommodate the smallest model and an 11-by-16-foot room for the largest model, called the Championship. Also, installers will need a day and a half to set up the system. Beecroft says he has taken 10 strokes off his handicap while practicing on a High Definition Golf simulator, but that’s only one reason why he says it’s worth the investment. "It will make you the most popular kid on the block," he says.
Golf to Go
If your concerns about buying a golf simulator are the cost and the size, you’ll want to take a look at the Newport from TruGolf. This portable simulator offers an experience comparable to those of much larger simulators, such as TruGolf’s Indoor Resort model. But it can be set up (and taken down) in 30 minutes in virtually any location—an office, the floor of a trade show, the corner of a rec room. The simulator can be transported in two carrying cases that together fit into the back of an SUV.
The system features technology called TruTrac, which uses sonic tracking to follow and calculate the ball’s trajectory, along with optical tracking to record the position of the club-face as it strikes the ball. These two systems work together to generate video simulation of the ball’s trajectory and a graphic display that details ball speed, side spin, launch angle, distance, direction, club speed, and distance left to the pin. The simulator comes with 15 courses installed; an additional 50 courses are available for purchase.
The cost of the Newport is just under $20,000. According to Chris Jones, managing partner at TruGolf, one of his customers invited a long-ball hitter to try his Newport. "When the guy hit a shot 315 yards, the simulator picked it up," says Jones. "And the guy was amazed that his game looked exactly the same on this simulator as it did on the actual courses."
Custom Fit
Not every home is designed with a golf simulator in mind. As a result, you might have trouble finding a room in your house that can be given over entirely to a high-end simulator. The solution offered by Visual Sports is to custom-design a simulator that will fit your available space. The company employs 3-D modeling software to re-create the room in which you want your simulator installed, and then designs the simulator, builds it, and installs it. "It makes for a more attractive installation," says Chris Lee, Visual Sports’ marketing manager. "It’s very appealing for customers who want to decorate around it."
Like other high-end simulators, the Visual Sports technology includes ball-tracking features that provide information about the trajectory of each shot. The simulator can provide you with video swing analysis, and it comes with a multisurface golf mat that can simulate fairway, rough, and sand surfaces. However, the simulator does not track the face of the golf club during the swing. "In a system that tracks the clubface you have to stand in the same spot for each swing. With this simulator, you can stand wherever you want," says Lee.
The system also comes with several games, such as soccer, hockey, football, and baseball, so that other members of the family can play their favorite game, too. The Visual Sports simulator costs from $26,000 to $30,000 for most in-home installations.