PGA Tour returns to US via Dunedin
When golf fans tune in to watch the return of the PGA Tour at Forth Worth, Texas, on June 11 they will also be watching a victory for hightech Kiwi ingenuity.
The vision of some of the world’s greatest golfers will be beamed back to an office in Dunedin, where Ian Taylor and his team will add their world-renowned graphics, and send it back to broadcasting giant CBS – all in under a second.
Taylor has worked with some of world’s biggest sports for years, but even for him this breaking new ground. In the Covid-19 era, this is working remotely taken to new heights.
‘‘The whole [golf] season starts again and this little company from Dunedin is going to be at the core of that, and we have developed all this technology while we have been in lockdown,’’ Taylor told Stuff.
‘‘With all the borders locked and the health and safety that’s around putting people out on big OB [outside broadcast] vans . . . while we’ve been in lockdown we’ve built in a full remote system and that’s never been done before.’’
So, when you watch a replay of a Tiger Woods shot with the ball tracking graphic, or see some virtual signage around the course, think of a group of very clever New Zealanders working away in a little office in the deep south.
For Taylor, the managing director of Animation Research Limited, necessity has been the mother of this invention.
Taylor and his team were in Florida in mid-March when Covid19 changed the world.
‘‘We were in America at the Players Championship on the first day,’’ he says. ‘‘We went back to the hotel and at 9pm we got a text saying the golf was totally cancelled.
‘‘We got on an airplane, flew back to New Zealand and rented AirBnBs and went into isolation. Just as we were about come out the whole country went into lockdown.’’
For someone with a contract to cover 80 golf tournaments a year on the US and European tours, all of which require staff on the ground,
Covid-19 meant Taylor had to look again at how his company operated – and quickly.
‘‘We do all the golf in the world –
80 weeks of golf a year but not only did Covid cancel all the golf overnight but it also has placed this other challenge of, ‘What do we do if we can’t get back there?’
‘‘We realised that although in these contracts the relationships are really powerful, if weren’t able to get there they might have to find someone else’’
Enter ARL’s design genius John Rendell, who in true Kiwi fashion ‘‘designed the whole system on a farm with his father, in a farmhouse’’. ‘‘The hardware alone
. . . we’ve had to order ports from China. There’s $100,000 of hardware to build it.’’
Now, Taylor plans to send two two-man teams to get the system underway in the US. One team will make it operational and the other will be on standby if the first team gets ill.
Then, both will fly back to New Zealand and operate it from Dunedin. There’ll be 24 camera feeds coming to Dunedin, from where the graphics will be added.
‘‘The machines we put into the OB in Texas will be operated by the ones we have back here in Dunedin,’’ Taylor says.
Taylor says this level of remote control is the future. For a start, it will reduce the carbon footprint and costs of sending teams all around the world every week.
‘‘It’s accelerated this,’’ Taylor says. ‘‘What I like about this is that it’s the positive that’s come out of Covid.
Our carbon footprint is enormous. You can imagine when you’re doing 80 tournaments a year we’ve got crews flying to different countries every week or to a different state.
‘‘Instead of a project we’d work on over two years we did it over five weeks.
‘‘New Zealand Trade and Enterprise have responded really fast, and the support is not just the money that has been made available, it’s the feeling that they have our back in these uncertain times and that’s as valuable to us.’’