LIVE VIEW GOLF DIGITAL MIRROR
There’s one big problem with using old-fashioned mirrors to get a look at the golf swing: You’ve got to look up to see the darned thing, which means coming out of your posture, even if just a little bit. So you’re not getting the true view of your move.
Sure, you can throw in a video camera, but then you’ve got to pause between swings and take a look, which takes you right out of your rhythm.
Shane Yang, the guy who invented Live View, has changed that problem forever with his new, tiny camera. It’s what he calls a “digital mirror.”
“Most people use a video camera to try to fix their swing, seeing what’s wrong,” he told Golf Tips. “They want to see it full speed and slow it down. And then you’ve got a mirror, trying to see what you have to do in order to get it to look right. It’s the idea of the physical sensation — creating the correct movement kinematically. The problem with video is the delay — you video it and then walk back to look at it. That’s why the mirror is so important. So we came up with the idea of combining the two — you’d be able to do both things much better.”
By connecting Live View to your iPad, iPhone or other digital device via Bluetooth, then placing both in front of you on the ground or practice station, you can capture your swing it as close to real time as possible — within fractions of a second.
“The secret sauce is you’ve got to bring the lag down; you don’t want to have to walk back and forth between your station and the camera,” Yang says, “When I started this company, I tried using a GoPro with a Wifi connection. I hooked it up to check my swing, but had to wait a couple seconds. You can’t practice like that; you lose all connection to what’s going on. So we decided to create our own camera.
“Speeding it up depends on optimizing the image path. The video quality is 640 x 480 VGA. We could go 1080p but that’s gonna take three to five seconds. So I said to myself, ‘I’m not sharing this with anybody, I just want to look at it myself, but I need it now.’ So we reduced the screen size and compressed the video to get the lag down to two milliseconds. It feels instantaneous; as you move, the screen moves with you.
“Now that you have the system, a bunch of things become possible. You don’t have to carry around a big mirror anymore; you have your camera and use an iPad or iPhone, put it on the ground in front of you, and essentially it’s a mirror. There are a lot of benefits when you practice. You don’t have to come out of your posture; you just put this by your ball and toggle it back and forth.”
You can play around with the camera’s placement, too.
“The camera can sit wherever you want — depending on what you’re working on. People have used it for putting. You get a different perspective on your stroke when you can see it from ground level; you can see the path of the putter. Some instructors use it exclusively for that.”
Now Yang is introducing another product that makes the swing feedback loop even tighter: A wearable camera in the form of goggles.
“Some of the feedback we’ve had is, ‘It’s really nice but there are certain things you can’t check, like your follow-through.’ So we’ve come up with AR goggles. Essentially it’s the same thing, but now you can see your entire swing, or whatever you’re doing, right in front of your eyes — it doesn’t have to be just golf.”
The Live View camera comes in two models, Plus ($329) and Pro ($349), which includes low light optimization and a wide angle lens option. The goggles will be available by late spring.
