NoFores

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Golf is very expensive and time consuming. Collegiate and pro golfers around the world have to spend more money and time playing practice rounds at courses they want to play tournaments at. Using VR, NoFores wants to provide golfers a way to study golf courses beforehand, without the need to spend more money.

NoFores is a startup that my sister, her colleague, and I started that helps golfers explore and interact with real world courses in VR. We leverage real world data and photogrammetry to convert photos taken by a drone to a 3D mesh. I am responsible mainly for integrating these 3D meshes into Unity and providing the features the game has.

The team and our idea has garnered some recognition through publications like the Pittsburgh Inno business journal and Poets and Quants.

We are currently still in the proof of concept phase but we are close to being done. We first acquired data points from a PGA Tour data analyst for hole 8 at Reflection Bay Golf Club in Las Vegas, Nevada. Our team then turned these point clouds into 3D meshes representing the different parts of the golf course (bunker, green, etc), and integrated these meshes into Blender then Unity. I finally textured these meshes and added some post-processing.

With a playable course now in Unity, we added arrows that indicate how big or small the slope around you is. I also added minimaps with top down views of the green and hole and a compass. I also added a distance indicator that shows how far away you are from the pin. We are now working on a way to visualize the trajectory of the golf ball when hitting and putting.

We are now in the process of adding new features to the game, with the main ones being displaying shot trajectory and polishing up the look of the game. In the future, we will add multiplayer and be able to obtain our own point clouds using photos taken from drones.