Waterville, Ohio: Clarity.Golf will be available at the PGA Show (ETC-5) to discuss the future Savant Smart Ball, and its fully resolved first-principles ontology for instrumented golf balls.
At the core of the Savant Smart Ball lies advanced MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) technology, researched and developed at the University of Michigan, frequently ranked the world’s top MEMS university with three of the top five ScholarGPS Lifetime MEMS Scholars on faculty.
“The magic is in a patented algorithm that emulates the gyroscope”, said Bill Bales, Clarity co-founder. “Gyros are frail, power hungry little guys. As the accepted standard for measuring the angular velocity (spin stuff) of a ball employs gyros, the required hardware melange constrains designs to idiosyncratic protective cores that look like giant marbles.”
“They remind me of the ‘shootin’ taws’ my dad taught me to use shooting marbles. Big guys.”
The Savant architecture eliminates both the brittle gyro and the heavy, hot rechargeable battery traditional design concepts have demanded. By integrating Clarity’s patented camera IP, the hybrid design minimizes hardware in the ball while the camera increases fidelity.
“Smart balls require apps. Apps run on smartphones. Smartphones have cameras,” said Clarity.Golf co-founder Dave Bisbee. “The Savant Smart Ball simply uses the camera that is already there.”
The result, compared to prior designs, is improved durability, tighter quality control, more robust manufacturing consistency, long-term stability and–perhaps what the market will appreciate most–collapsed cost and robust fidelity.
The Savant Smart Ball’s internal electronics are contained within a tiny metal puck weighing less than two grams. The puck generates virtually no heat, is tolerant to extreme shock, and sits inside an otherwise normally architected ball core.
The protective puck is embedded in a way that is mechanically indistinguishable from the surrounding core materials, preserving feel, balance, and on-course performance.
Depending on the type of play, the Savant Smart Ball is expected to function for not less than 15,000 shots and, in some use cases, well over 100,000 shots across the life of a single ball.
The smartphone camera, operating through the app, provides a real-world reference frame for direction and motion. This addresses limitations that ball-only smart systems can encounter over time by resolving ambiguity and drift through vision-grounded calibration.
The Savant Smart Ball is being built to operate across the full spectrum of use, from the lightest putts to the most violent long-drive impacts.
“Clarity.Golf’s intent over the next 12 months is to bring logical instrumented ball capability to market,” said Bisbee.
“We define ‘logical’ as delivering launch kinematics equal to or better than the finest launch monitor systems available today, combined with a ball that cannot be distinguished from a non-instrumented ball, at the same price as a non-instrumented ball.”
Clarity.Golf will exhibit at booth ETC-5 at the Golf Show and will be launching Cicero, a free commons that enables independent golf practitioners to gain access to a zero cost, cogrowing, and meaningful suite of emerging golf measurement technologies under Clarity’s belief that golf is human, and its practitioners should be empowered by emerging technology and not be disintermediated or diminished.
Clarity.Golf
Press Contact: Bill Bales (bill@clarity.golf)
