The PGA Tour has published an augmented reality experience that lets fans take a virtual tour of the TPC Scottsdale golf course with Hololens. And now the league is accelerating those efforts with the launch an iOS augmented reality app this spring.
The PGA TOUR’s Hololens app, which recently became available for free in the Microsoft store, provides users with a bird’s-eye view of the course by placing a tabletop-sized digital rendering and 3D map of it in the physical world in front of them.
Built in conjunction with Taqtile, a startup that builds map-based augmented reality experiences (including this one for the Cleveland Cavaliers), the app offers users access to real-time local weather and PGA TOUR ShotLink data of player statistics from last year’s Waste Management tournament, where the Hololens experience first debuted but wasn’t made public until now.
Fans will be able to view their favorite players by hole and see their shot trails and compare two players on each hole to see how they performed and the distance they achieved with each shot. Heat maps of each hole show where the most ball traffic occurred during the tournament.
Users can soar around the course like a bird and zoom freely in and out of specific holes. There’s also detailed 3D models of the clubhouse and grandstands at TPC Scottsdale’s famous 16th hole, which features stadium seating that close it off from the rest of the course.
PGA TOUR says the TPC Scottsdale experience is the first holographic golf application designed to enhance fans’ enjoyment of the sport and their perspective of a tournament. The league plans to launch more augmented reality apps in the coming months in attempt to revive people’s interest in golf and reach younger demographics.
“We wanted to offer a really unique view of the course for fans at the intersection of digital technology and golf,” said Devon Fox, the PGA TOUR’s director of digital platform innovation. “We know that reaching out to younger and more diverse fans means developing experiences for the platforms and technologies they use every day.”
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The PGA TOUR has been experimenting with augmented and virtual reality for the past few years, though many of those projects have never seen the light of day. Fox said the league plans to take advantage of the Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore to accelerate those efforts and create more fan-facing augmented reality experiences, with an iOS app set to launch this spring.
“Recently, we’ve started working on an ARKit app integration that takes advantage of the revolutionary capability to blend our proprietary ShotLink data and 3D objects (like golf tees and balls) into the world around us,” Fox said. “We believe this blend of objects, data, and the natural environment around the user will create unique golf experiences that fans won’t be able to find anywhere else.”
Taqtile, which builds AR experiences for clients in and out of sports, believes augmented reality maps will offer a new perspective on places in a way two dimensional maps never have been able to provide.
Outside of the fan engagement side for golf, for example, Taqtile co-founder and COO Dirck Schou believes golf course makers could use this technology alongside historical shot data to reimagine course layouts and make overall play more challenging or interesting.
Schou believes this kind of augmented reality 3D mapping improves a person’s “general situational awareness” of a place, and that it can also apply to a host of other industries outside of sports.
“The Hololens represents the state-of-the-art very near future of the digital tools that we will have in order to better address problems in all aspects of our civilization,” he said. “If you’re a power company and you want to run a new set of power lines near a neighborhood, how does this sort of deeper understanding of the three dimensional enhance your ability to interpret that location?”
Another interesting component of the Hololens app in particular is that it can be viewed in a collaborative mode, allowing multiple people in an experience to simultaneously view the same thing.
“It allows you to understand objectives and explain a story in a more compelling way,” Schou said.