| General Fiction posted October 30, 2023 | Chapters: |
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Encouraging news from Pennsylvania
A chapter in the book Saving Mr. Calvin
Saving Mr. Calvin - Chapter 47
by Jim Wile
| Background A story about the origin and the future of the game of golf |
See Author Notes for the list of characters and unfamiliar terms.
Recap of the past few chapters: Kevin calls Kenny and Abby in Altoona, while Ernie calls E.J. with the hope of finding out what happened to the swing suit. It was a tough sell to convince the Pennsylvania folks they were for real, but Kenny, Abby, and E.J. are at least willing to discuss things further with them and reveal that the suit was never commercially available due to a problem with the motors that power the suit. They agree to hold a Zoom meeting with Kevin’s team in a few days to discuss it further.
During the Zoom meeting, Kevin explains the circumstances surrounding the time travel and reviews each one. By giving further details about the trip to Altoona, he is able to convince Kenny and E.J. of their veracity. Abby is still skeptical. The Californians then describe the simulator to the Pennsylvanians and learn why Abby’s suit was never produced. Paul volunteers to help Abby find a substitute for dysprosium, and they all exchange emails.
The guys continue brainstorming after their Zoom meeting. Kevin explains why they should strive for extreme realism—mainly to set this simulator apart from all others. They also discuss how it will address the two biggest deterrents to golf, namely slow play and the difficulty of learning the game. Kevin will formalize their key points into an official business plan.
Chapter 47
Over the next five weeks, the three of us began seriously delving into the design of the various components of the simulator. The attempt for realism was the real challenge.
We would be projecting the image of being on a golf course onto a spherical screen surrounding the room using a number of different projectors. With current simulators, you hit a ball into a flat or slightly curved screen, onto which is projected a 2-dimensional image of a golf hole. The ball strikes the screen with an audible thud and then drops to the floor, where you will hear another thud. This is unacceptable in a life-like simulator. Instead, we would be using a sound suppression system to eliminate the thuds of the ball striking the screen and the floor, but we also devised a way to disguise the image of the ball dropping to the floor by a method of visual camouflage. We would project the color of the background it would be moving down onto the ball itself. The golfer would be so absorbed watching an image of his virtual ball sailing away on the screen that he wouldn’t notice the camouflaged ball dropping to the floor, especially since it would be soundless.
We planned to make the floor (the ground) movable in several directions. To give it undulation, it would consist of thousands of tightly packed-together rods that could move vertically up and down from below to form hills and swales, but atop them would be a set of smaller rods that could move horizontally the way a treadmill moves. Their action would be initiated as soon as the golfer begins walking on them. In actuality, the golfer would remain in place, but it would seem as though he were moving forward. The golf cart would work the same way. As soon as you depressed the go pedal, it would trigger the floor to start moving backward to simulate the forward movement of the golf cart. The difficult part of this movement would be to have the surroundings move in conjunction with the floor so that it would look like real movement through the area. This was going to take some extremely complex programming on Ernie’s part to coordinate the projection of the surroundings onto the spherical screen surrounding the room with the movement of the floor.
You would be able to see an image of your ball on the ground as you approach it, but then, as you get right to it, there must be a real ball again for you to hit your next shot. This would come up from below the floor to replace the image of the ball projected on the floor and, if done right, you wouldn’t even notice the transition from image of ball to actual ball.
The top layer of the floor that moves horizontally to simulate forward motion would also house the artificial grass that would be capable of raising or lowering, depending on your lie. This would be accomplished by means of electromagnetic repulsion and attraction acting on metal bottom-tipped grass bunches that can extend up and down through a network of small holes in the surface of the top layer of the floor.
Let’s say you hit your drive into the rough on the right. From the tee, you begin walking down the fairway, which has nice, uniform, short grass. When you get near your ball, you start veering your steps to the right, and you cross from the fairway into the rough. While you are walking in the fairway, the rough would appear as a projected image ahead and to the side, but as you cross the boundary of the image on the floor, the grass would physically rise from below to rough height by extension of the artificial grass, but just like the ball rising from below to replace the image of the ball, the grass would smoothly transition from a projected image of longer grass to actual longer grass, which you would hit your next shot from.
Real sand bunkers presented another major design challenge. The image of a struck ball may roll or fly into a projected image of a bunker, but when you get to the bunker and step down into it to hit your ball out, it would have to feel like you are stepping into sand for the simulation to feel real. Once in the bunker, you would wiggle your feet to get a good footing in the sand, and an actual ball must fly out of actual sand when you blast out for the illusion to work. Most of the bunker would be a projected image, but where you and the ball are would be in a true sand layer. Beneath the floor, there would be a tray of sand that would move into place to replace the layer of grass that slides over out of the way, and the tray of sand would come up through the floor in its place. When the golfer takes his shot, the sand would fly up and out, landing on the surface of the floor in front, but would quickly be vacuumed out of sight from vacuums below the floor. That’s the concept anyway, and I know it will prove to be a real challenge for all three of us to get this to work with a sense of realism.
Realistic putting was also another challenge in design. We wanted to be able to simulate any length putt and have the ball fall into a real hole in the floor when sunk. Here’s how a 30-foot putt would work: The golfer would strike the ball on the green, and the ball would move forward a few feet before it sank into the floor out of sight to be replaced by a projected image of the ball moving toward the hole. If it misses by, say, three feet, you would walk ahead on the backward-moving floor until you reach the image of the ball, which is then replaced seamlessly by an actual ball raised into place from below. A real hole would also have opened up in the floor to replace the image of the hole. You could then putt the real ball into the real hole and pick it out again. If instead you had holed the 30-footer, you would have seen an image of the ball falling into a hole, but when you walk forward to the hole, it would convert to an actual hole with a ball in it for you to retrieve.
Once we had come up with these major design ideas, we were convinced we could really make a go of this, and we unanimously decided to go forward with the project. There were thousands of other smaller details to work out, but we had confidence that we could meet any challenges we faced.
Yesterday, we received some outstanding news from the Pennsylvania contingent when Abby called to tell us she had located a source for a rare earth element called neodymium, which is one of the 15 lanthanides like dysprosium that previously went into the manufacture of the servo motors for the suit. Abby claimed that neodymium is just as effective as dysprosium, but the best news was that within the past few years, it began being mined in West Virginia and is now commercially available right here in the US. She has also located a manufacturer to create the servo motors she needs for the suit that will use an alloy with a neodymium component. Abby said she and Kenny, along with some help from E.J., were planning to pursue the manufacture of the suits again. The timing might work out such that we would become their first customers, and we both could go a long way in promoting each other’s companies.
Everything seems to be falling into place, so very soon I will be giving notice at work that I’m resigning. This will come after I secure financing to get started on our prototype, since neither Paul, Ernie, nor I have enough capital to invest in what it will take to get started. I began researching some possible sources of funding.
(4 more chapters to go)
By now, I'm sure you've heard enough about how the simulator will work. I promise that's the end of it. We'll get back to the fun parts with the next chapter.
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