The Golf Lesson Idea

In 1990, Richard Baker, a professional PGA golfer, wanted to improve his golf swing and considered how valuable it would be to receive a lesson from leading professional golfer Tom Watson.

Because a personal lesson was not realistically available, Baker began considering whether emerging technologies could be combined to provide the nearest practical alternative.

Baker had no formal experience in the various technologies involved. His only directly related practical experience was video-recording golfers during lessons.

Combining the Technologies

Baker brought together in his mind a number of technologies that could capture his golf swing and transmit information representing it to a computer. The computer would compare his movement with stored information representing Tom Watson's swing, identify the areas in which help was needed, and select relevant expert comments stored in a database.

The selected information would then be assembled automatically into a personalised audio-visual instructional presentation and returned in near real time for Baker to view on a television or other monitor.

A New Computer-to-Human Interaction

The computer would do more than store or replay a fixed lesson. It would use information about the individual's own performance to determine what that person should be shown and told.

By applying stored expert knowledge and audio advice to the person's current performance, the system was intended to provide an experience approaching face-to-face communication with an expert teacher.

This sequence - capture, comparison with expert knowledge, evaluation, and automatically generated personalised audio-visual instruction - became the foundation of the invention.

The 1990 Technical Challenge

The required communications, imaging, processing and presentation technologies were limited in 1990. The challenge was therefore to determine how the available components could be combined to perform the complete process.

Later technologies would improve the speed, accuracy and practicality of implementation, but the essential computer-to-human interaction had already been conceived.

Instruction Before Personalised Response

At the time of Baker's invention, instructional systems had long presented knowledge through books, lectures, manuals, diagrams, audio recordings and video recordings.

Every person learns differently, makes different mistakes and progresses at a different pace. Yet most instructional material provided the same information regardless of the learner's current performance.

The learner was generally expected to interpret the material, recognise their own mistakes and determine how to improve. Where practical skills were involved, the absence of observation and personal response was an important limitation.

The Limitation of Conventional Instruction

A book could not observe whether its reader had misunderstood an explanation. A prerecorded video could not determine whether the learner's movement differed from the demonstrated technique. A printed diagram could not evaluate changing performance.

These forms could deliver general instruction, but they could not capture a person's current performance, compare it with expert knowledge, determine what help was needed and automatically respond with personalised advice.

Baker's Response

Baker saw how a computer, working with video and other technologies, could store an expert's knowledge, demonstrations and audio advice in a database. It could capture a person's movement, compare that performance with stored expert performance, identify what the person needed help with, and automatically generate a personalised audio-visual advice presentation.

The presentation could be returned in near real time, giving the person an experience similar to having an expert teacher present. Because the expert's knowledge and advice were stored and applied automatically, the same system could potentially provide personalised instruction to millions of people in a day without requiring the expert to be physically present for every lesson.

Although golf provided the initial example, the architecture could be used wherever a person's current performance could be captured, compared with stored knowledge, evaluated and answered with personalised audio-visual information.

An Advance in Personalised Non-Theatrical Video

Another aspect of Baker's concept concerned the production of instructional and other non-theatrical video itself. Conventional prerecorded video could demonstrate and explain a subject, but the presentation had already been produced and substantially the same material was presented to each viewer.

Baker's architecture proposed a different process. Information concerning the individual would be captured and evaluated against stored knowledge, after which the computer would automatically assemble a personalised audio-visual presentation appropriate to that individual. The resulting presentation could combine regenerated or comparative visual information with relevant stored expert audio comments.

In this sense, the computer was not simply being used to replay or distribute video. It became part of the process by which a new personalised audio-visual presentation was produced for the individual. The completed presentation could then be returned through a communications system for viewing, downloaded or stored on an appropriate medium for later viewing.

Baker regarded this as an important advance for non-theatrical video: moving from one prerecorded instructional presentation for many viewers toward computer-produced audio-visual information determined by the needs and performance of an individual.

Looking Ahead

Section 2 explains how observation, comparison, evaluation and personalised audio-visual response operate together within the complete instructional architecture.

A Connected Documentary History

FINALSTEP brings together selected surviving records that allow readers to follow the invention from its 1990 conception through patent protection, technological development, commercial implementation and later legal proceedings.

The archive presents these events chronologically so readers can see how the original architecture intersected with advances in computing, communications, sensing and artificial intelligence.

Selected public original documents remain separate from later commentary wherever possible, allowing readers to examine the evidence and reach their own conclusions.