PING is using their Vicon system to push the boundaries of golf performance
PING is one of the world’s leading golf club manufacturers, with a legacy stretching back more than six decades. The company began in the garage of founder Karsten Solheim in 1959 when, frustrated by the putters of the day, he sought to engineer a higher-performing set of clubs.
65 years on, Solheim’s garage has been replaced by the PING Proving Grounds, a PING Putting Lab, the Kinetics Launch Pad, the Flight & Collision Depot, a Test Field and, most recently, the PING Performance Research Centre at Loughborough University. They’re manned by a staff of engineers and PhDs, dubbed the Golf Science Team, committed to improving club design and fitting. But the mission remains unchanged from its origins in Solheim’s garage: enhance the performance of golfers with clubs backed by leading-edge science.
Insights from Vicon motion capture technology were first incorporated into PING’s club fitting process with its use of the Enso laboratory 14 years ago. The Performance Research Centre brings PING’s suite of facilities right up to date with a hybrid system that mixes Vantage cameras with Valkyrie VK8s.
Watch the video below or scroll down to continue reading.
“Here at Loughborough, we specialize in human/equipment interaction. We want to better understand how humans are using our equipment and then tailor that interaction for them,” says Chad Saunders, PING Research and Test Engineer.
“This is where we develop the leading edge of our measurement technologies, so we’re interacting with different pieces of equipment like force plates, developing new measurement tools, like the motion capture system, and even new metrics within those,” says Saunders.
“The lab has an indoor full-swing simulator, and we can do everything from chipping and pitching all the way to driving and longer shots,” explains Jonathan Shepherd, Head of Performance for PING. “We have force plates as well as 16 Vicon cameras. We’re really lucky to have a split system with Valkyrie and Vantage cameras to leverage the benefits of both and really unpack our golfers’ swings.
“A Vicon system, for us, really allows us to do an MRI for the golf swing and understand both the kinematics and where that club’s moving in space, as well as the forces, torque and kinetics that the golfer is enacting on the club.”
PING has a huge body of data that its Golf Science Team can dive into to answer research questions. “We capture a lot of data,” says Saunders “PING has around 1.2 million swings captured, and about 100,000 of those are with motion capture systems. With our catalog of swing of data, we know what happens very well. And we’re just trying to answer why things happen.”
Shepherd gives an example: “We’ve just run 300 of our employees through a seven iron to driver and then a big wedge protocol to hit different shots. From mining that data, we’ve already been able to tease out some really interesting biomechanics of how someone’s hitting different golf shots, and that will lead our next five years of development design.”
Pushing new boundaries
The latest frontier of PING’s research is women’s golf. The company has brought in Ph.D. student Lindsey Legg to pose and answer questions about how female golfers play.
“How do they interact with the equipment?” she says. “If we change different properties of clubs, how are they going to react? But then also, how do we optimize equipment for that population?”
The overarching question driving the research, Legg says, is “What would golf look like if it was developed with only females playing? We do have some research that has been done with women, but a lot of it’s been into how women are different from men. There’s a general consensus that there’s greater shoulder rotation, greater hip rotation, but I think what’s lacking is how that is implicated in golf performance. You can even go down to the most fundamental level—how are we modeling a female golfer?
“The cool thing with the Vicon markers is that I can optimize and make my own marker set to find those differences, and maybe add a new marker set that better quantifies the motion of female golfers.”
Driving Vicon hardware to its limits
PING’s Valkyrie cameras, in particular, have opened up new possibilities for the company’s research.
“They’re just a step up in every regard,” says Saunders. “They’re more powerful, they’ve got better fields of view, and they can just help us model the golf swing more accurately.
Valkyrie’s adjustable focal length has been crucial. “In our system, we have cameras mounted to the walls, so we can’t be very flexible with where we put them,” says Saunders. “But actually being able to adjust that focal length enables us to answer so many more research questions. So we can essentially zoom in when we’re doing small swings like chipping or putting, or zoom out and catch the big fast things with a driver.
“We’re always pushing this technology as hard as we can. A golf swing is a very fast movement. A club head typically travels at around 120 miles per hour, and we capture at 800 hertz, so we’re taking 800 pictures every second. And even then, the golf club will travel around six centimeters between each frame. We’re running the cameras as quickly as possible. We want as much speed as we can get. And the reason the Valkyrie cameras are so good is because they have such a wide field of view that when we run at high speeds, we’re not losing any of the golf swing that we want to measure.”
For Legg, who is new to Vicon technology, the approachability of Vicon Nexus and hands-on support has been an asset. “I think it’s super user-friendly. I think it’s amazing that you can run all the different pipelines and build your own custom scripts like MATLAB and Python, and be able to import them into Vicon Nexus.
“And one of the big things is just having the support. Having open lines of communications is a huge help.”
For Shepard, all of the speed, accuracy and precision opens up bigger possibilities.
“Sport is such a great vessel for storytelling, for getting people together to really have genuine experiences with each other, and even for understanding the world,” Shepherd says. “I’m a scientist myself, and a tool like motion capture can really explain to someone why they behave in a certain way, in a way that they’ve never really been able to see before. And it’s that ‘aha’ moment of being able to dive into the data with someone and tell them something about themselves which they didn’t know.”
For more on the ways in which a Vicon solution can deepen your understanding of sports, visit https://www.vicon.com/applications/life-sciences
How can you use motion capture for your projects?
Build, customise and visualise your own motion capture system using the Vicon Visualisation Tool.
Build your system