High-Tech Golf Simulators For Your Home
Enjoy your favourite past time—or improve your swing—without leaving the house
Enjoy your favourite past time—or improve your swing—without leaving the house
While you may want to spend every waking moment on the golf green, life has a cruel way of impeding this dream. Technology, however, has made the next-best reality possible thanks to state-of-the-art golf simulators.
Links enthusiasts can now enjoy their favourite greens and world-famous courses or just work on their long and short games, from the comfort of their home—and with decidedly less walking.
HD Golf
The golf simulator for those who want to play the same courses as the pros. Using patented image processing software and a combination of high-res digital imaging, satellite, and geophysical data, HD Golf recreates nearly 40 championship golf courses (like Pebble Beach and St. Andrews) with unflinching accuracy—right down to the tree, bunker and hazard-level. But HD Golf is more than just a pretty face. The HD Pro Instruction Studio uses shot data in conjunction with swing analysis and pressure mapping to offer tips on form, while the device’s advanced computer vision technology ensures seamless communication between man and machine for a pinpoint-accurate simulation.
Pricing for installing an HD Golf simulator in your home is available at hdgolf.com
Foresight Sports
For players who want to use their time away from the green to improve their game, Foresight Sports is the solution. The core of the Foresight Sports simulation experience is its Game Changer line of advanced launch monitors, which capture an incredible wealth of information about every single swing you take and present the data in an easy-to-understand format that will let you improve your game, from form to clubs. In addition Foresight Sports launch monitors are endlessly portable, meaning if there’s enough room to swing a club, you have enough room to set up a simulation studio. Players who opt for Foresight’s FSX 2020 simulation software will enjoy high-fidelity graphical renderings of world-famous courses as well as a variety of skill challenges designed to improve specific parts of your game.
Pricing for Foresight Sports golf simulators is available at foresightsports.com.
SkyTrak
Golfers who want an out-of-the-box option would do well to look at the SkyTrak SwingBay Golf Simulator Package. Coming with everything you need to set up a professional golf simulation studio in your home, the SkyTrak SwingBay Package will allow users to measure their performance across 15 different data points, compete against friends and strangers in peer-to-peer matchups, and features a range of game improvement options, allowing users to work on their optimal swing from the comfort of their home office. SkyTrak is also simulation-software agnostic, meaning users can use whichever compatible simulator they prefer, and try new options as they come along. All that and it comes with a military-grade screen capable of withstanding shots of up to 402km/h
The SkyTrak SwingBay Golf Simulator Package is available for $13,113
TruGolf
If graphical integrity is of the utmost importance to you, then No. 1 you have great taste and No. 2 check out the TruGolf Vista 12. A full simulation set up that includes a HD 720p projector, a dedicated computer, a 21-inch touchscreen, premium turf and a portable enclosure, the Vista 12 is capable of expertly tracking your every swing—and offering meaningful tips for improvement—thanks to its TruTrack 2 system. But where the Vista 12 really shines is in its E6 Connect technology, meticulously crafted software that provides a detailed and realistic simulation experience, immersing users in the next best thing to a being on a real course.
The TruGolf Vista 12 is available for approx. $26,805 or can be upgraded to a pro version with a level two dedicated computer and HD 1080p Projector for an additional $5326
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual
Competitive pressure and creativity have made Chinese-designed and -built electric cars formidable competitors
China rocked the auto world twice this year. First, its electric vehicles stunned Western rivals at the Shanghai auto show with their quality, features and price. Then came reports that in the first quarter of 2023 it dethroned Japan as the world’s largest auto exporter.
How is China in contention to lead the world’s most lucrative and prestigious consumer goods market, one long dominated by American, European, Japanese and South Korean nameplates? The answer is a unique combination of industrial policy, protectionism and homegrown competitive dynamism. Western policy makers and business leaders are better prepared for the first two than the third.
Start with industrial policy—the use of government resources to help favoured sectors. China has practiced industrial policy for decades. While it’s finding increased favour even in the U.S., the concept remains controversial. Governments have a poor record of identifying winning technologies and often end up subsidising inferior and wasteful capacity, including in China.
But in the case of EVs, Chinese industrial policy had a couple of things going for it. First, governments around the world saw climate change as an enduring threat that would require decade-long interventions to transition away from fossil fuels. China bet correctly that in transportation, the transition would favour electric vehicles.
In 2009, China started handing out generous subsidies to buyers of EVs. Public procurement of taxis and buses was targeted to electric vehicles, rechargers were subsidised, and provincial governments stumped up capital for lithium mining and refining for EV batteries. In 2020 NIO, at the time an aspiring challenger to Tesla, avoided bankruptcy thanks to a government-led bailout.
While industrial policy guaranteed a demand for EVs, protectionism ensured those EVs would be made in China, by Chinese companies. To qualify for subsidies, cars had to be domestically made, although foreign brands did qualify. They also had to have batteries made by Chinese companies, giving Chinese national champions like Contemporary Amperex Technology and BYD an advantage over then-market leaders from Japan and South Korea.
To sell in China, foreign automakers had to abide by conditions intended to upgrade the local industry’s skills. State-owned Guangzhou Automobile Group developed the manufacturing know-how necessary to become a player in EVs thanks to joint ventures with Toyota and Honda, said Gregor Sebastian, an analyst at Germany’s Mercator Institute for China Studies.
Despite all that government support, sales of EVs remained weak until 2019, when China let Tesla open a wholly owned factory in Shanghai. “It took this catalyst…to boost interest and increase the level of competitiveness of the local Chinese makers,” said Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a research service specialising in the Chinese auto industry.
Back in 2011 Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, explained what set Chinese capitalism apart from its American counterpart. “In America, when you bring an idea to market you usually have several months before competition pops up, allowing you to capture significant market share,” he said, according to Fast Company, a technology magazine. “In China, you can have hundreds of competitors within the first hours of going live. Ideas are not important in China—execution is.”
Thanks to that competition and focus on execution, the EV industry went from a niche industrial-policy project to a sprawling ecosystem of predominantly private companies. Much of this happened below the Western radar while China was cut off from the world because of Covid-19 restrictions.
When Western auto executives flew in for April’s Shanghai auto show, “they saw a sea of green plates, a sea of Chinese brands,” said Le, referring to the green license plates assigned to clean-energy vehicles in China. “They hear the sounds of the door closing, sit inside and look at the quality of the materials, the fabric or the plastic on the console, that’s the other holy s— moment—they’ve caught up to us.”
Manufacturers of gasoline cars are product-oriented, whereas EV manufacturers, like tech companies, are user-oriented, Le said. Chinese EVs feature at least two, often three, display screens, one suitable for watching movies from the back seat, multiple lidars (laser-based sensors) for driver assistance, and even a microphone for karaoke (quickly copied by Tesla). Meanwhile, Chinese suppliers such as CATL have gone from laggard to leader.
Chinese dominance of EVs isn’t preordained. The low barriers to entry exploited by Chinese brands also open the door to future non-Chinese competitors. Nor does China’s success in EVs necessarily translate to other sectors where industrial policy matters less and creativity, privacy and deeply woven technological capability—such as software, cloud computing and semiconductors—matter more.
Still, the threat to Western auto market share posed by Chinese EVs is one for which Western policy makers have no obvious answer. “You can shut off your own market and to a certain extent that will shield production for your domestic needs,” said Sebastian. “The question really is, what are you going to do for the global south, countries that are still very happily trading with China?”
Western companies themselves are likely to respond by deepening their presence in China—not to sell cars, but for proximity to the most sophisticated customers and suppliers. Jörg Wuttke, the past president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls China a “fitness centre.” Even as conditions there become steadily more difficult, Western multinationals “have to be there. It keeps you fit.”
Chris Dixon, a partner who led the charge, says he has a ‘very long-term horizon’
Americans now think they need at least $1.25 million for retirement, a 20% increase from a year ago, according to a survey by Northwestern Mutual