A home golf simulator sounds great until you add it up. You need a room with a high ceiling, an impact screen, a hitting mat, a projector, a launch monitor and software. Many setups run into thousands of dollars before you hit a single ball.
So I’m trying a different route. Instead of building a room, I’m building the course itself: a virtual golf course on screen, played with a swing the program can read.
The idea
Every golf game, cheap or expensive, needs three things:
- A course to look at: the fairway, the green, the view from the tee
- A way to read the swing: how hard and how straight you swung
- Ball physics: how far the ball carries, where it curves, where it stops
The expensive part of a real simulator is the second one, measuring a real ball. I’m skipping the ball. The program reads the swing motion and works out the shot from that.
My first hole
I built a one-hole prototype called Cliffside: a 381-yard par 4 with the ocean on the right and out-of-bounds trees on the left. You swing on a swing pad, and the ball flies, curves with the wind and rolls out.
Each hole has two layers. One is the picture you see. The other is a simple color map underneath that tells the program what’s fairway, rough, sand or water. That split is what lets me swap in any course image I want later.
Where this is going: golf on other planets
Once the course is just an image plus a map, it doesn’t have to be on Earth.
Both images are AI-generated concept art, not real courses. Same hole, two worlds: the coast at sunset, then the Moon.
Golf has already been played off this planet. In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon. With one-sixth of Earth’s gravity and no air, a ball there flies much farther and never slices, because there’s no air to make it curve.
That’s the kind of hole I want to build: a green on the Moon, a fairway across a red Martian canyon, a course floating in space. Each world can change the rules of the shot.
What’s next
In the next posts I’ll show how the swing is read, how the ball physics works, and how I make course images.
Honestly, this project started with a simple wish. Between work and everything else, I rarely have time for a round of golf, even when I get a free hour. So I started imagining: what if I could step onto a beautiful course anywhere, even on the Moon, and take a few swings to unwind? That’s what I’m building.