Wentworth Golf Club showcases new course to the golfing world before it exists

When Wentworth Golf Club embarked on the ambitious plan to re-design the world famous West Course, the management team and designers called on the services of PinPoint Visualisation to showcase the planned new design to the golfing world.

Wentworth Golf Club was PinPoint's very first customer when it pioneered the use of low level aerial mapping combined with GPS technology as a hole locator system. To date the Club has issued members and visitors with over half a million hole locator cards.

Wentworth's long term relationship with the PinPoint team meant that the Club realised the best way to show players, members of the press and the public what the course would look like in 10 months time was through PinPoint Visualisation. Every new feature, green, bunker and fairway had to be created in a visualised environment, based on accurate survey data.

The benefits of using the PinPoint Visualisation system were apparent even before the final visualisation was released to the public. The designers were able to use the images to ensure that their design would work before the bulldozers were called in.

The first version of the visualised course highlighted to Ernie Els and his design team that one of the holes wouldn't quite work in the way that they had envisaged on paper. Julian Small, Chief Executive of Wentworth Club, explains: "We had five different visualisations of that hole before we were happy with it. Without the PinPoint visualisations it could have been a disaster and would certainly have cost us time and money to put things right."

The final version of the Wentworth West Course launch video combined 3D visualisation, photography, archive film footage and a voiceover by Peter Alliss.

The final visualisation was unveiled to members at the Wentworth AGM. Then copies were sent out to all members, the world's press and every European Golf Professional. Stills from the video were used in national newspapers and golfing magazines and on national television.

Julian Small explains why the PinPoint visualisation was so successful for Wentworth: "Re-designing the West Course was a huge undertaking for us. It is known around the world as the location for the PGA's flagship European event. If we wanted to close the course and make any changes we needed to be sure that the new course would be world class and we needed to ensure that we communicated that to our audience of golfers and enthusiasts. The superb visualisations that PinPoint created for us not only assisted in the design process but enhanced the communication process and allowed us to show the world what we had planned before any work had even started."

He continued: "It generated a huge amount of interest from across the globe and the amount of publicity the images generated was astounding."

Wentworth continues to use PinPoint's technology in its yardage charts. Many of the world's golf courses use PinPoint generated course guides as a source of revenue, as well as enhancing the player's experience.

Julian Small concludes: "The PinPoint team have been an excellent marketing partner for us. They work to seemingly impossible timescales to produce images of such quality that it is almost impossible to separate the virtual from reality.”