At one end of SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, a player stands on real turf and swings at a ball bound for a screen 64 feet wide and 53 feet tall. Radar and cameras measure the shot before it even gets there. The ball stops at the screen, but then digitally continues, flying over a fairway that doesn't exist.
At the other end of the arena, the ground moves. The green sits on a 41-yard-wide turntable that can rotate 360 degrees, with 608 actuators beneath sections of the putting surface changing its slopes between holes. Around it all, is a theater-style bowl that can hold nearly 1,500. It’s built for a league that brought Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy indoors for primetime television.
The league is TGL, developed by TMRW Sports, co-founded by Woods and McIlroy and sports executive Mike McCarley, in partnership with the PGA.
Then, about three hours north, in a retail suite on Stoneybrook West Parkway in Winter Garden, The Back Nine sells Full Swing simulator sessions from $55 an hour. The screen is smaller, there isn’t a stadium surrounding it, but the tech pipeline behind it is recognizably the same. There are sensors that capture the strike, software that computes the flight, and a display that renders the result fast enough that the golfer never notices the handoff.
That pipeline is why the future of golf is increasingly becoming AV integration work. The National Golf Foundation cites 48.1 million Americans aged six and older who played some form of golf in 2025. Of those, 29.1 million played on a course, and 19 million participated only off-course - at ranges, simulators, and at entertainment venues. Almost two in five of those participants played without even setting foot on a course, and a growing share of them are playing in front of a screen, just like the one at SoFi and in Winter Garden.
Making a Shot Believable
From behind the ball, the transition to the screen has to feel continuous. The TGL challenge is to make a golfer who has just felt the strike against the club face, watched the ball leave the ground, and then have the simulated flight follow convincingly from both.
To meet that challenge, Full Swing supplies 18 KIT launch monitors to capture ball and club data in the hitting area. According to GOLF, six sit behind the back box, six behind the front box, and three in each side pit, with dedicated units for right and left-handed players and redundant units so no shot is lost.
"With 18 of these things being live, they basically talk to each other," Evan El-Saden, VP of Innovation at Full Swing, said.
Toptracer's camera sensors then track the ball's flight toward the screen and feed TGL's data engine, which extrapolates the rest of the trajectory through to the virtual hole. The official rules place the front and back hitting boxes about 20 and 35 yards from the screen. That distance buys the cameras time to observe the flight and leaves room for shots from grass, rough, and sand.
The numbers have passed at least one demanding test. Before TGL's first season, Rory McIlroy checked the league's system against his own launch monitors and found that "every number was virtually identical," according to Golf Digest. The room has presented other problems. As humidity dropped over a match night, McIlroy said, the bunker sand dried out until "my club was going through flour instead of going through sand."
The GreenZone Problem
For the short game, play moves to the “GreenZone.” A ball is placed at the physical spot matching its virtual position, and the player chips or putts toward a real cup. The tracking system now has to find a small white ball across a large surface whose contours change between holes.
St. Louis-based Systematic Consulting Group describes SkyTrack as having four cameras, with backups, each capturing at three times 4K resolution and 30 frames per second. A straight-down view was impractical, so the cameras look in at steep oblique angles and software stitches their views into a single overhead image. Machine vision then assists operators, who zoom, pan, and mark ball positions through a web-based interface.
The engineering will look familiar to anyone who has specified a mission-critical video system. If a camera fails, a fault-tolerant hardware and software layer automatically re-routes and re-stitches the remaining feeds. Systematic reports average positional accuracy of less than an inch across the roughly 22,500-square-foot short-game area. In a televised match, a dead camera cannot be allowed to stop play.
The surface has already been rebuilt once. Ahead of Season 2 of the league, TGL expanded the putting green by 38%, to 5,270 square feet, and increased hole locations from seven to 12. Two Full Swing Virtual Greens now cover 1,250 square feet with 608 actuators, up from 567. The green's highest point was lowered 18 inches, and the ball-tracking camera towers were relocated to the ceiling to open up fan sightlines. TGL says the changes drew on first-season data and player feedback.
Letting the Crowd Follow
From the stands, following a ball between turf and screen takes help. Samsung, TGL's official screen partner, supplied the LED layer. Per Samsung's case study, that includes a 600-square-foot outdoor XRB marquee at 5,000 nits, two indoor VMR wing walls of 1,250 square feet each at a 2.9mm pixel pitch, and roughly 100 more screens.
Andrew Macaulay, Chief Technology Officer of TMRW Sports and TGL, said that the aim was for "the live experience to create an atmosphere that could be felt on TV."
Full Swing's software ties the virtual holes to physical play, and its touchscreen Digital Caddie lets teams study a hole before choosing a shot.
Golf by the Hour
Down the turnpike, the same vendors appear at resort and retail scale.
Southwest of Orlando, Omni Orlando Resort at ChampionsGate announced the opening of Eagles Edge in March 2024. Its 30 open-air, unnetted bays run Toptracer Range, backed by 47 televisions and an event lawn for gatherings of 1,000. Each bay turns a range session into shot traces, statistics, and virtual courses.
At Orange Lake Resort near Kissimmee, Holiday Inn Club Vacations announced 12 Toptracer bays at The Legends in November 2023. The range's website lists rentals from $30 to $60 per bay per hour, with shot traces and statistics on an in-bay monitor or mobile device. The camera-based tracing that feeds TGL's data engine in Palm Beach Gardens is the same brand projecting ball flights over a resort range.
Indoors, The Back Nine's Winter Park location offers members 24/7 access. Like the Winter Garden site, it runs Full Swing simulators, putting TGL's technology partner into rooms booked by the hour.
At Athletic Motion Golf Club in Winter Garden, the stack moves toward the lab. The club runs eight Trackman bays, and its instruction programs add GEARS 3D motion capture, force plate analysis, and SAM PuttLab. True Spec opened a Trackman-equipped fitting bay on site on 1 June 2026, with a matrix of more than 70,000 club head and shaft combinations.
The pipeline extends statewide. Five Iron Golf signed a 12-location Florida franchise agreement in January 2025, naming markets including Orlando, Tampa, and Jacksonville, all built around Trackman. Its Coral Gables flagship opened in June 2026 with 12 Trackman simulators across 30,000 square feet. The rest remain planned, not built.
Why Golfers are Moving Indoors
Currently, there’s a lot of demand for set ups like this. The reason why is mainly the weather. In a 2025 National Golf Foundation white paper, 59% of simulator users cited weather-independent play, ahead of better practice (43%) and performance data (34%).
Time matters too. The USGA reports that the average round now runs four and a half hours, a new high, while the NGF puts a typical simulator visit at 90 minutes.
However, the screens don't appear to be emptying courses. In NGF survey data, 29% of traditional golfers who used simulators said they played more on-course afterward, and 2% said they played less.
However, playing in a simulator bay doesn’t necessarily mean success out on a real course.
Rupe Taylor, a PGA teaching professional in Virginia Beach, prepared for the 2025 PGA Championship on a Trackman simulator in his garage, playing virtual rounds of Quail Hollow and using its feedback tools to refine his swing. He finished ninth at the PGA Professional Championship to earn a place in the field, then missed the cut at the real Quail Hollow. MyGolfSpy's verdict was that dialed-in ball striking can get a golfer a long way. It also noted what a screen can't reproduce: rough lies, sloping fairways, and real-world wind.
Much of the installation work behind all of this is familiar AV territory. A bay needs correctly positioned sensors and displays, power, network, and calibration. An entertainment venue adds televisions, audio, and the business of keeping dozens of bays running at once. SoFi Center, Full Swing, Toptracer, Samsung, and Systematic each own a different layer; a resort or franchise usually buys a turnkey package from one vendor.
Either way, someone has to answer for it when a shot fails to register or a screen goes dark, and that is service work integrators already sell.
What Comes Next
The 2027 PGA Show returns to Orlando in January. Demo Day opens the week on 26 January at Orange County National in Winter Garden, a short drive from The Back Nine and Athletic Motion, with the Orange County Convention Center exhibition running through 29 January. Buyers will test tracking hardware in the same town where golfers already rent it by the hour.
TGL is growing too. Motor City Golf Club joins as the seventh team for 2027, with Brooks Koepka signed in August.
Back at SoFi Center, the ball still stops at the screen. Late on a match night, with the 15th and final hole still undecided, a player steps into the back box and takes one last look at the target on the wall. The arena goes quiet. He swings, and the ball thumps into the screen and drops to the turf. For a heartbeat, nothing. Then the trace climbs across 64 feet of fairway, hangs, and falls toward the flag.
His teammates are off the bench before it lands, arms up, and the crowd are on their feet as the ribbon boards light up around the bowl. Nobody in the building is thinking about radar, frame rates, or camera failover. Eighteen launch monitors caught the strike, the software computed the flight, and the screen drew it in time for the roar. Keeping that happening, every match and in every bay, is becoming integration work.