The Evolution of Golf Instruction
In recent years data and technology has become such an integral part of sport, as more statistics have been tracked and cutting-edge technology has enabled the use of those statistics in increasingly more complex ways. Golf is a sport that has been taken over by statistics, as players have begun tracking and using stats to become more consistent with every shot in every situation on the golf course. Launch monitoring has become essential for any serious golfer looking to maximize performance, by recording and analyzing data around each golf shot to understand how to dial in one’s swing. As someone who has been playing golf their entire life, I’ve seen the tremendous benefits to understanding one’s numbers and correcting for inefficiencies in ball spin, club path, club face angle, and attack angle. Golf instructors have learned to use these technologies along with multiple cameras and video editing software to help players understand their own golf swings and visualize how to improve. As artificial intelligence has become a popular topic in the technology industry today, I’ve thought about how it can be used to advance golf instruction in the future.
Companies like TrackMan and FlightScope have revolutionized the industry by creating portable launch monitors that use radar technology which allow players to capture data from any shot any place in the world. Using a combination of radar, infrared and high-speed imaging, a company like TrackMan can measure 25+ golf ball, golf club, and performance statistics in a second. Virtually every top professional and amateur golfer has used or owns one of these launch monitors and uses them in daily practice. What if a company like this implemented cutting edge computer vision technology to further enhance their product? I believe that this will be the next phase of golf instruction as companies like TrackMan can train A.I.’s on vast amounts of data taken from professional golfers across the world and begin to give tailored recommendations to students based on both video and statistics.
Launch monitors today primarily use radar, which uses radio waves to determine the location, proximity, and speed of an object. Radar has been around since 1935 and was first used as a ship detection system by the British. It is still widely used today as it can be amplified to detect objects at ranges where other emissions such as sound or visible light would be too weak to detect. LiDAR, on the other hand, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, uses light in the form of pulsed lasers to measure ranges between it and other objects. This technology is typically used in the automotive, agriculture, architecture, and digital design fields as it creates a 3D representation of the surveyed environment. Computer vision is a part of automated intelligence where humans teach computers to interpret and understand digital images or videos. By training a computer with images, videos, and other visual outputs, the A.I. can start to derive meaningful information from these images and begin to make recommendations based on that information. The first launch monitor company to incorporate this field of A.I. technology into their products can unlock countless opportunities.
Computer vision is already being used in sports which is why it’s an obvious choice to extend the technology to golf. Viso.ai, a development platform the helps enterprises design and implement computer vision technology, publishes a blog about the applications of computer vision. In this piece on use cases for computer vision in sports, it outlines some of the most common which include player pose tracking, motion capture, stroke recognition, and real-time coaching to name a few. Real-time coaching is exactly what I think the game of golf needs, as the search process, cost, and travel required make quality coaching difficult to attain. By using video analytics, which is the process of extracting useful information from video footage, companies like TrackMan have the potential to create digital instructors, trained on the greatest swings of all time, which can provide real-time feedback and guidance to any student of the game. This technology is already being used in Yoga, where vision-based self-training systems can be used to give instructions on how to adjust body posture to prevent injury. A company called Kaggle published a yoga pose image classification dataset that anyone can use to train an A.I. Even if TrackMan collected and sold the data that their equipment captures, this can be a lucrative line of business for the company and can inspire entrepreneurs to train A.I.’s on this data.
The golf swing has evolved countless times over the years as equipment has improved and golfers have become more athletic. Golf instructors have had to adapt, unlearning tried-and-true techniques and finding ways to help each player be the best they can be. Computer vision technology has the potential to come up with more innovative techniques and tailored drills that even the most seasoned professional instructors have not yet seen. Bryson DeChambeau, a professional golfer, and statistics fanatic, decided to make all his irons a single length and has had great success with those clubs for the last 5+ years. I’m excited to see what other creative solutions we could discover with the help of computer vision and artificial intelligence.
