Is this outlandish indoor course the future of golf design?

No one can say for certain what tomorrow will bring, but it doesn’t hurt to take an educated guess.

As golfers, we can gaze into the crystal ball and wonder: Is this the future of course design?

The image in question comes from Tianjin, a booming municipality in northern China, where the ribbon was just cut on an out-of-the-box venue called City Golf: a sprawling, indoor course that combines virtual and real-world play.

If that sounds a bit like the SoFi Center, the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., facility custom-built for the Tiger Woods-led golf league, TGL, yeah, well, sorta. The difference is that City Golf was designed for public play. And while the SoFi Center will boast a single, giant screen and a single, modular green, City Golf features 18 screens for 18 holes with 18 synthetic greens, spread across 106,000 square feet (nearly the equivalent of two football fields), inside a giant convention center. 

It’s a full-blown, high-tech indoor course.

The company behind it is GolfZon, the South Korea-based screen golf giant, whose honchos have hailed the project as both bleeding-edge and eco-conscious: all the high-tech pleasures of the game, on a smaller footprint.

GolfZon chairman Kim Young-Chan has described it as “the most ideal urban golf course,” offering “a new and unique golf experience akin to playing a round on a real course right in the middle of the city.”

Simulators are hardly new to golf, but their use in alt-golf-as-entertainment venues has been on the rise, evident in concepts ranging from TGL to Fairway Social, Topgolf Swing Suites, X-Golf and Five Iron Golf. Like those other venues, City Golf aims to further tap the golf-as-lifestyle market by offering additional services and amenities, including golf lessons, merchandise, fitness classes and dining. (It also hosted a $700,000 screen golf tournament last month.)

Nor is it meant to be the only one of its kind. If you’re looking to the future, consider this: GolfZon says it envisions expansion for City Golf into major cities around the world.