In golf, taking into account too much information can often be a detriment to your game. If you analyzed every factor at play for that par 3 tee-shot, or 5-foot putt you’d be the slowest (and therefore most hated) golfer on your course. The good news is, when it comes to R&D, Ping isn’t slowing down your course. They however are using tons of data to help build better putters. In a recent study of players on the putting green equipped with eye-tracking software they made a very interesting discovery.
How it Works
You’ve likely heard of eye-tracking software before. It’s been around for some time now… and studies are on-going to determine how different putter shapes and alignment aids effect and change how our eyes focus at address. The system is simple enough, it’s a set of glasses that has two cameras, one pointed down at the ball and surroundings, and another directly at your eye. After some testing and calibrating, it has an incredibly accurate sense of where your eyes are looking at all times during your putting stroke.
As you can imagine, this is a ton of data to sift through. But when Ping reviewed the data, in conjunction with feedback from the test subjects, they notices something very interesting.
Most subjects looked directly at the shaft label at some point before their stroke.
They didn’t knowingly do this. They couldn’t recall doing it, but for some reason, their eyes moved away from the putter and ball and focused elsewhere for a split second. Ping knew that when focus was taken away from the ball and putter, it reflected poorly in putt performance. So, naturally the next step came down to design changes.
On all of Ping’s models from now on, the label has been moved out of line of sight, nestled right up next to the grip. This crazy subtle change to your putter will likely go completely unnoticed by the average golfer. And since the action of glancing at your label in the first placed was unnoticed, will be one of those ‘behind-the-scenes’ changes that will improve your putting prowess, without you even noticing the difference.
Cheers to solid R&G Ping!
For more details on the testing, please head over to the main resource for this article (and image) here: https://www.mygolfspy.com/rd-tools-eye-tracking/