Toptracer highlights the innovation that brought you the ability to see ball flight paths in golf broadcasts and at the range.
In the late ’90s, Daniel Forsgren was watching golf from his living room in Sweden and growing increasingly frustrated. He couldn’t see the ball.
Seeing the ball—something so fundamental to the golf-viewing experience—was next to impossible with the technology of the day. So Daniel set out to make a change.
He spent the next several years tinkering with a new kind of camera with sensors that could detect a golf ball flying through the air. The sensors connected to a computer that looked for a small, white object and identified it through each frame of the shot. Daniel quit his IT job in 2003 to focus on developing a prototype.
In 2006, Protracer was born. Soon after, the PGA TOUR, European Tour, and television outlets all over the world jumped at the opportunity to partner with Protracer. Golf fans could finally see the flight of a golf ball through on-screen graphics, along with speed, distance, and other valuable insights. Watching golf on TV would never be the same.
Protracer launched the first prototype of Protracer Range in 2012. The system, which used the very same technology seen on TV, could be installed at driving ranges to trace and analyze shots hit by ordinary range-goers.
Topgolf Entertainment Group acquired Protracer in 2016 and rebranded the tech as “Toptracer.”About TopTracer
Today, Toptracer can be seen on major championship golf broadcasts throughout the golf season. Toptracer Range is an “Official Range Technology” of the PGA of America and its nearly 28,000 PGA Pros worldwide, and the tech is installed in more than 24,000 bays globally.
You can watch Marques Brownlee talk more about PGA tour broadcast technology here: youtu.be/MV1qaFv4VUg.
