Golf is one of the most popular sports worldwide and many are always looking to get to a green or driving range. John O’Brien looks at how AV can help people hone their skills indoors.

As the world’s second-largest manufacturer of projectors, BenQ, is “constantly looking and checking for where our projectors provide the best solution to end users” according to country manager Martin Moelle. One of the niches they have found good fit and success in is golf simulators.

In this scenario, the view of a golf course is projected onto a flexible, impact-resistant screen. The vision feed is driven by golf software that also measures the output of high-resolution sensors to track club head and ball direction.

With our mostly agreeable climate, Martin notes that: “Generally, any day of the year in Australia is a good day for golf. But, regardless of that, the benefit of having a golf simulator is that you can finish a round much faster because you are not walking the course.

“What we are interested in is getting the best possible outcome for those people who play golf and are stuck inside.”

Why not panels?

There are many visually impressive LED and LCD screens available in the market, but they are not really up to this job. Martin highlights the obvious reason why: “Because you are whacking the ball as hard as you can into a (flexible) screen, there won’t be any other technology that’s available for this kind of simulator – projectors are the only solution for you.”

The BenQ advantage

BenQ has a really high and strong pedigree in two technologies that give us an advantage over every other projector manufacturer. As Martin explains: “The first one is gaming, or e-sports if you like. We have the product that has the lowest latency and fastest response time in the market.”

This is very important when considering the pace of the club head and ball. If the image display cannot keep up with that, the illusion of reality will suffer.

“You want a really fluid experience that doesn’t have jitters or lagging or something like that in there,” Martin expands.

Physical attributes of a golf simulation environment define “the next big advantage we have” according to BenQ.

“We are quite adept at making short-throw products,” he says.

“The positioning of the projector needs to be relatively close to the screen. It can’t be too far back. We’ve got a really strong light engine technology that enables the lens array to be able to install the projector quite close to the screen.”

And once that projector is installed, usually high up and tucked out of the murderous range of a wayward one wood, the ideal outcome is not having to adjust or maintain it. BenQ uses DLP technology in their golf projectors. For DLP, all of the BenQ light engines are encapsulated, which means they are dust-free. This means that there’s no need for dust filter maintenance on the projectors.

Engage ‘Golf Mode’

Martin boasts that BenQ has always been very keen on colour accuracy. This becomes vital when displaying colour-rich imagery where it is hard to replicate the vivid shades of green on tees, fairways and greens or the contrast of sky and clouds.

Creating a visual contrast at the edge of grass cut at differing heights is essential for an immersive experience.

To achieve this goal, Martin outlines that BenQ: “Have a user mode called ‘Golf Mode’ on our golf projectors. What this enables, is that it optimises the picture quality to be nice blue sky or nice green fairways.”

This dedicated mode also enhances water features and helps the user’s eye with enough contrast to clearly see landscape features that affect their golfing experience and perception.

Add 4K resolution to HDR on some models, and the viewing impression becomes that much richer.

When the day’s (virtual) rounds are completed, the projector and screen combo can be used for family entertainment.

“If you do pay the extra and get a high-resolution projector, then you can double up the golf simulator space as a movie theatre as well,” Martin finds.

Hook up a games console and you can have even more fun with your friends and family too.

Lamps are, like, so last year

Technology continues its advance. As does end user perception.

“A big barrier for end-users was the lamp. Many end-users still have a perception that the lamp is very expensive and difficult to replace, which it no longer is,” Martin says.

“But we are moving away from lamp models. In the whole projector space, the vast majority of products that we are promoting for golf-sim are all laser or LED models.”

Apart from the relative lack of ongoing maintenance required for such models versus lamp-based ones, Martin notes that the eye perceives LED and Laser to be brighter than lamp: “It’s the nature of the technology – and once it’s installed, end users are quite surprised by how good the picture quality is.”

Projections

Martin is obviously proud of BenQ’s offerings. He says that the team is really going hard on golf simulation because they believe they have the best solution for end users: “We want to set ourselves as the benchmark in this space.”

And while Australian demographics are small compared to the whole world, BenQ sees golf as one big market.

“What we’ve found globally, is that end users who play golf, especially overseas, are not short of budget, so they’re prepared to go the extra step and get a higher quality product,” Martin says.

And BenQ is not content with just that. Martin says that the company is looking to expand into the whole simulation space, from trucks, flight simulations, racing and even railway sims.

“The announcement of the TGL virtual golf simulation league is a natural consequence of the technology advancement,” he says.