SmartGolf VR

Play real golf courses with just your hands. Grab a controller to feel the swing. Add the SmartGolf club for precise swing replay and AI coaching: a complete golf course at home.

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Inspiration

VR golf has always had promise, but two things held it back. A golf swing depends on a still head and a centered balance, and the weight of a headset made it hard to keep a proper swing form. And most VR golf games fly the ball from a rough controller wave, not from your real golf swing.

SmartGolf started as a mobile and PC golf app with its own motion-sensor club that reconstructs real swings precisely, letting people play real courses at home. Lightweight devices like Meta VR Glasses now make a real swing in VR comfortable. So we set out to bring immersive golf to VR: start with nothing but your hands, swing with a controller, and — our goal — reproduce your real swing results accurately in VR, anywhere.

What it does

SmartGolf VR offers three ways to play, each adding depth:

  • Hands only — the full round. Pinch to open the swing meter, pinch to set power and direction, and watch your golfer strike from a spectator view behind the ball. Every step of a round works without controllers.
  • Controller — the joy of the swing. Hold the grip to step into first person and see your hands and club. Press ready, the camera eases back, "Swing Start!" appears, and your golfer swings with you. The ball leaves the moment you strike.
  • SmartGolf club — precise replay and AI coaching (our existing product). Owners of our motion-sensor club already get precise swing reconstruction and AI coaching in the SmartGolf app. Our goal is to deliver that same precise golf in VR, so your living room becomes a complete golf course.

A caddie stands beside you and gives distance and club advice by voice (English, Korean, Japanese). Score and hole info live in a drawer you pull in from your left, so the course stays clear. Start on a free virtual course, then explore premium courses from Korea, Japan and the USA built from real terrain data.

How we built it

Unity 6.3 (URP), Meta XR SDK v207 and OpenXR, on our existing production codebase — the same game logic that ships on mobile and PC, extended for Quest. Interaction SDK hand rays and pinch drive world-space panels converted from our phone UI. A Quest-only layer adds the seat/camera system, the controller swing detector (virtual club head speed per club), the caddie (UMA avatar with pre-rendered multilingual voice), and the HUD drawer.

Challenges we ran into

  • Turning a phone HUD into something comfortable in a headset: we removed floating overlays and moved information into a body-anchored drawer and a spoken caddie.
  • Keeping the controller swing feeling immediate while our golfer animates: the avatar now starts its swing with your takeaway and the ball launches at your impact.
  • Shipping VR features without disturbing a live mobile app: all VR work lives on a separate branch with compile checks that prove the phone build is unchanged.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A complete hands-only round, a first-person-to-spectator camera handoff for controller swings, and a caddie that turns to talk to you — built on top of a real product rather than a prototype.

What we learned

Hands-first design changes everything: big targets, fewer steps, and information delivered by voice instead of numbers on screen.

What's next

Gaze-and-pinch targeting for Meta VR Glasses, a hand-held course map, picking clubs from a golf bag, and precise golf in VR with SmartGolf club swing replay and AI coaching.

Built with (tags): Unity · C# · Meta XR SDK · OpenXR · Interaction SDK · Universal Render Pipeline · PlayMaker · UMA · Firebase · Google Cloud · Photon · Android Try it out: https://smartgolf.biz

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