Event Sensor Golf

We are the first business in 45 years to introduce a new way of measuring golf analytics: event sensors.

Event sensors are vision sensors, but they are different than conventional cameras like the ones in your smartphone. Most cameras have a shutter that opens and closes quickly, taking a series of pictures that form a video. Event sensors don’t have a shutter. Instead, all pixels continuously and asynchronously detect changes in light intensity. If a pixel sees light getting brighter, it fires a yellow event. If a pixel sees light getting dimmer, it fires a blue event. In the left panel of the video above, notice that the background is black. Nothing is changing in the background, so the event sensor reports nothing.

Golfers only care about things that move… their club, body, and ball. Golfers do not care about stationary objects. So when we use conventional cameras to film golfers during their practice sessions or rounds, we waste data and power to record things that nobody cares about, like the ground or the sky. That redundant data requires greater computational resources, which in turn requires larger, heavier, and more expensive batteries. Event sensors offer a smarter way to record visual scenes.

Efficiency also translates to speed. Event sensors respond to changes in light intensity within a microsecond. So they “film a scene” at an equivalent of 1,000,000 frames per second. This incredible speed allows us to see things that nobody else can in normal operational conditions (i.e. outside of a high-speed camera lab). For example, the compression of a golf ball with a driver:

Or the dimples and text on a golf ball in mid-flight:

Or the flex and vibration of a club shaft due to a ground strike:

Currently there are only two technological solutions to measure golf analytics: Doppler radars (Trackman, Garmin, etc) and high-speed cameras (Foresight, Rhapsodo, etc). The origins of these tech solutions predate World War II. Such old tech solutions cannot measure brief, violent, and explosive events accurately and efficiently. They have drawbacks that required hundreds of engineers decades of time and countless millions in R&D budgets to bring to market. We are uniquely positioned to avoid these drawbacks and introduce a superior tech solution to market.

See our next page on our “Value proposition” to see how we turn these analytics into actionable insights to improve performance.