Dude, where's my ball?

Rajaram Gurumurthi

About this app

Find your lost golf balls with this AI-powered golf-ball finder.

1. Launch the app and grant access to your camera.
2. Point the camera in the direction of your golf ball.
3. Pinch to zoom and take a closer look.
3. If the app finds your ball, it will emit a beep and draw an expanding bubble around the location where it is found.
4. A thumbnail of your last "find" is shown in the top right area of you screen. Tap on the thumbnail, to switch to the photo-browsing mode.
5. The following gestures are supported in the photo-browsing mode:
- Swipe left/right through the last 10 finds,
- Pinch to zoom into any photo,
- Pan around each photo with one finger,
- Tap to reset zoom.

The video feed from the camera is shown as a thumbnail in the top right area of the screen. Tap on it to return to video mode.

The app works best under the following conditions:
- The ball is between 1 to 15 yards of the device,
- At least 30% of the ball is visible,
- The camera is steady and not moving very fast (Using a gimbal stabilizer with your device is likely to help),
- The ball is brightly colored and has good contrast with the surroundings.

While the app has been trained with a dataset of over 7,000 images of golf balls of different colors, taken in various settings and at various distances, it is by no means perfect. It does detect false positives (e.g. other round objects such as pebbles and leaves, and brightly colored objects such as flowers).

What’s new

Initial release for Android.