Virtual Eye News

Virtual Eye Golf were in Florida in mid-March, covering the Players Championship on the PGA Tour. All sporting events were suddenly cancelled, and the world went into various forms of COVID-19 lockdown. Virtual Eye's operator teams flew back to New Zealand, and the company began to ponder how to deliver live sports graphics without having operators on the ground.

Two months later, after a hefty investment in hardware and some clever coding, Virtual Eye Golf returned to the relaunched PGA Tour on June 11 for the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Woth, Texas - and our company name couldn't be more appropriate: Onsite computers in America were controlled by our operators here in New Zealand - displaying requested graphics in real-time, over 12000 km from the tournament.

We intend to support the PGA Tour through to the end of the 2020 season, so the same virtual operating was used the following week at the RBC Heritage in South Carolina, at the end of June for the Travelers Championship in Connecticut, and early July at the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit.

In addition to the usual 'Virtual Eye' product using Toptracer ball tracing on tee shots on a 3D model beside the live golfer shot and Virtual Flyovers that also display GolfTrax statistics, we have also introduced 'Virtual Signage' - using Augmented Reality to display statistics 'on' the course. Virtual Eye also helped develop TOURCast for the web and multiple devices, to track the action of golf players playing on the PGA Tour in real-time on an interactive 3D model. https://www.pgatour.com/tourcast/