In the past five years artificial turf has benefited from new technology using rubber compounds and synthetic fibers to create some very realistic turf. This new turf is now finding its way onto golf courses. This new synthetic turf not only saves money by eliminating the use of water and fertilizers, it does not get affected by disease or weather conditions.
In Australia, by the Great Barrier Reef, the drought-plagued city of Rockhampton has begun construction on the world's first 18-hole synthetic golf course at Zilzie Bay on the Capricorn Coast. The par 70 Reef Palms course on the doorstep to the reef will feature 18 fully synthetic greens and surrounds and 18 synthetic tee boxes.
Golfers will be able to play the course in perfect condition every day regardless of the time of year or the weather. A number of the world's best golfers have synthetic greens built in their homes to practice on during breaks from the PGA Tour.
Just think, the 2020 U.S. Open may one day be played on a Synthetic Golf Course. The golf gods will surely revolt, but with maintenance budgets in excess of a million dollars a year at many golf courses, this may be the sign of things to come.
Now this sounds to good to be true, imagine wearing a hat that gives you feedback on your golf game and the ability to tell you the yardages to the flag stick.
Advisor golf caps and visors have built in to the brim of a standard golf cap or visor a sophisticated set of electronics, allowing what appears to be an ordinary cap to function as a complete Golf information system. Controlled completely by Speaker Independent Voice Recognition, this cap allows the golfer to get yardage data, enter and track scores, pace of play timing functions and many other capabilities.
Inside the head band of the cap is a high quality specialized microphone that picks up audio directly from verbally spoken sound waves, sound is picked up from bone conduction. This makes advisor completely insusceptible to wind noise and side chatter as it only "hears" the wearer.
Combined with state of the art sophisticated Speaker Independent Voice Recognition, the ADVISOR continually monitors the user?s speech and acts accordingly. All commands are prefixed with the word "advisor" to discriminate normal speech from commands, so to get yardage to green, the user may simply say "advisor distance" and a pleasant voice responds with yardage information or other helpful details as requested.
Using GPS, real time positioning information is continually tracked against a detailed map of the users selected golf course, and distances to green leading/center/trailing, water bunkers and fairway boundaries are calculated. By using an easy to learn set of voice commands, anything from simple green distance to a full explanation of all in range features can be listed.The only question I have is, can you wash it? and what happens when your playing in the rain or there is cloud cover. Stay tuned for more information as I try to get my hands on one of these and put it too the test.
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