Swing Coach

Our product seamlessly blends immersive tutorials in mixed reality for beginners and personalized swing analysis for advanced players fostering a holistic golfing experience at every skill level.

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Inspiration

In recent years, golf has experienced a remarkable surge in popularity, attracting a diverse range of individuals eager to embrace the sport. The allure of spending time outdoors in beautiful green landscapes and the social aspects of the game have also contributed to its widespread appeal..

However, for beginners looking to venture into the world of golf, the initial challenges can be both exciting and intimidating. Mastering the fundamentals of proper posture, grip, and swing mechanics requires patience and dedicated practice. Coordination and timing, essential elements of a successful golf swing, often pose challenges for those new to the sport. On the other hand, more advanced players seeking to elevate their game face a unique set of challenges. Fine-tuning an established swing to achieve greater precision and power demands a nuanced approach. Identifying and addressing specific weaknesses or inconsistencies in technique becomes crucial for improvement.

In both cases, a supportive and tailored learning environment is essential. Beginners benefit from structured guidance and accessible learning resources, while advanced players thrive with personalized feedback and opportunities for targeted skill enhancement. Recognizing the challenges unique to each stage of proficiency in golf is crucial for fostering a positive and rewarding learning journey, whether one is just starting or seeking to reach new heights in their game.

What it does

Our innovative golf learning app is designed to cater to both beginners and advanced players, fostering a comprehensive and immersive golfing experience. For beginners, the app offers step-by-step tutorials and interactive lessons that guide them through the fundamentals of proper posture and swing mechanics. After providing posture tips, the app provides a visual representation of the ideal swing path traced around the wrist, personalized to the height of the player.

For advanced players, the app introduces a comparative analysis feature, allowing them to assess their own swing path against that of professional players like Tiger Woods. This not only serves as a source of inspiration but also as a practical tool for identifying areas of improvement. The app acts as a personalized coach, offering targeted feedback and insights to help players refine their techniques and take their game to the next level.

CONNECTION

This year’s theme of CONNECTION is weaved into our app through three ways:

  1. Fortify the mind-body connection which is integral to mastering the art of golf. Our app does this by providing immersive tutorials and interactive lessons for beginners, guiding them through the intricacies of proper posture and swing mechanics
  2. Help connect with other golf-enthusiasts and foster a supportive community. We facilitate this connection by creating a platform where golf enthusiasts can come together, share insights, and encourage one another on their respective journeys.
  3. Cultivate a sense of connection with professional players, bridging the gap between aspiring golfers and their idols. Our app, by providing a unique opportunity to compare players' own swing path with those of renowned professionals like Tiger Woods, serves as both motivation and a valuable learning tool, allowing players to glean insights and refine their techniques.

How we built it

Our Swing Coach application helps golfers to visualize a proper swing plane and execute a golf swing with this swing plane guide in their field of view. As a golfer, it is often quite difficult to self-diagnose issues and understand whether your technique is correct. The primary way golfers practice their swing is by going to the driving range and performing swing drills that help them understand the difference between "feel" and "real". Sometimes, it may feel like your swing is on plane from your point of view, but in reality a 3rd party observer could easily tell that it is not. This is one of the reasons it can be so useful to have a golf coach or to take videos of your swing. Each of these methods for training involves a few pain points. Videos are 2D in nature so multiple angles are required to understand how the swing looks an all axes. This can be quite cumbersome to setup or expensive to get equipment that makes it easy. Also, golf coaches can be quite expensive and only accessible for an hour or two at a time. Swingcoach allows golfers to easily view the "real" spatial data of how their swing was executed by showcasing a drawn line of their swing alongslide an ideal swing plane. Lastly, a score is calculated! This is score helps the golfer understand how close their swing was to the ideal swing plane. A higher score indicates a better swing, and a score of 100 indicates a near perfect swing!

In summary, with swingcoach, there is now an inexpensive and accessible options for golfers to practie their swings at all hours of the day with the important spatial data that will help them self-correct their swing without the need for expensive coaches or traveling to a driving range.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Confusion around getting the Presence platform tie into Unity Events
  2. Converting Figma to Bezi to Unity

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Helping one of our teammates learn how to play golf

What we learned

  1. Feature Prioritization
  2. Understanding user pain-points

What's next for Swing Coach

In the future we would like to add a few important features:

Additional factors for visualization and calculating the score:

  • Controller/club rotation - we can showcase the ideal rotation of the controller/club at each point along the swing plane versus the actual rotation
  • Head movement - we can showcase the ideal movement and rotation of the golfers head at each point along the swing plane versus the actual movement and rotation
    • A high score panel and a leaderboard for you and your friends
    • A method for visualizing past swings and navigating through your progression
    • Diagnose individual parts of the swing and point the golfer to which stage of the swing requires correction

Comparative Analysis

We plan to use machine learning to help players compare their swing to professional golf players. The vision model we plan to use is based on a paper and algorithm called GolfDB. It analyzes the eight different golf swing sequences. Top golfers' motion data is used to train this model, showing the gap between an XR player and elites statistically. The model then predicts the scores, thus enabling the skill improvement of the player.

Community Engagement

We want the app to be a platform for golf enthusiasts from all walks of life and experiences who can come together to share insights, help improve their game, and encourage one another on their respective journeys. To enable that, we want to build features such as community forums and collaborative challenges within our app to transform golf into a communal pursuit, fostering connections among players irrespective of their skill levels.

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