FAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

PEBBLE BEACH IS YOURS FOR THE PUTTING,THANKS TO VIRTUAL REALITY.

Let it be known. Virtual reality golf is here, and it is good.

It's good because golf takes tons of time. Hours for a tee time, hours to play
a round, in sunshine if you're lucky, in hail and brimstone if you're not. Add
lost balls, tornup greens, and the threat of lightning and Lyme disease, and you
know why 20 million American duffers at one time or another consider beating
their clubs into plowshares.

Enter virtual reality golf.

Instead of spending the night trying fitfully to get some sleep in your car (in
the hope of getting a tee time at your public links), you enter a private room,
press a button, and voila, you're at majestic surfside Pebble Beach, or stately
tree-lined Pinehurst II, or the European Championship Links of Quinta do Lago,
Portugal (all through a large screen on the wall and the miracle of
software behind it). Drop a ball on the plastic turf, dial up wind
velocity-nae wind, nae golf, say golf's sadistic originators, the
Scots-pinch yourself to see if you're dreaming, and let it rip.

Now if you live in the city, worse, New York City, where 7 million souls are
shoehorned into a few unescapable square miles, you've really got something,
don't you think?

The two different systems I played, InGolf and Par T, use infrared beams,
photo-optical detectors, and computers to track the ball's velocity, spin, and
direction. Whack your drive against the screen, the computer computes, and a
blurred facsimile hooks or slices down the fairway. Then instead of having to
search for the ball, or even schlepp through the grass to get there, the screen
instantly changes, and without flexing a muscle you're peering at the flagstick
or at the trunk of a tree.

Select your next club (after spotting the digitized yardage) and hack away
again. Finally, hopefully upon reaching the green, the plastic grass at your
feet metamorphoses into a putting surface. Drop your ball on a prearranged
spot, knock in your putt, dial in your score, and it's on to the next
championship hole.

Raise your hand and a real waiter arrives, opening a frosty bottle of beer.
Ooops, that's not virtual reality.

In Manhattan I played Par T at Midtown Golf and the World Trade Country Club,
and InGolf at the Eastern Athletic Club in Brooklyn Heights (there are Par T and
InGolf courses around the nation). Both systems cost their owners more than
$30,000, about the price of a membership in a fancy country club. It'll cost you
about $25 an hour, and both use real balls, though InGolf's ball contains an
inserted mirror to be positioned precisely on a tee. Both promise extreme
accuracy (Par T says to within a yard), My feeling is that the two systems tend
to come up short on the drives and long on the slices-but then again, I usually
come up short on my drives and long on my slices.

Par T uses thousands of photos of real courses blown up onto the screen, whereas
InGolf paints its fairways and greens like a giant video game. InGolf's
advantage: In a pixeled re-creation the ball melds in better with its
surroundings; for example, it has a shadow, splashes with the appropriate glub
in water, ricochets with a rifle crack off tree limbs. Disadvantage: You're
always wondering whether Donkey Kong will appear to stomp you into a divot.

A tree in your way? Par T conveniently ignores the fact. (Midtown Golf swears
they're going to fix that.) The simulated ball on the screen looks more like a
whizzing alien than a golf shot. InGolf's trees are identical, like a cartoonit
is a cartoon-and golf's joys are, for us hackers at least, largely aesthetic.

Of course, standing in the sun with the wind in your hair and, after taking a
whack, watching your golf ball waft into a cloudless sky can never be simulated.
Neither can shivering in the rain, waiting forever to hit a shot, or losing half
a dozen balls on your first hole after staying up all night to get a tee time.
Hey, you can't have everything.