While the action goes on this weekend at the British Open being held at the Royal St George's Golf Club on the southern coast of England, online golfing fans everywhere can experience and play a virtual version of the famous tournament and host golf course online at World Golf Tour (WGT). That's because the Wold Golf Tour has partnered with the R&A (Royal & Ancients) to recreate the Royal St George’s Golf Club, the host course of the 2011 British Open, and create a virtual version of the British Open as a high-definition virtual reality game online. Anyone can compete in the Virtual British Open and play Royal St George’s online for free by visiting www.opengolf.com or www.wgt.com. GamerLive.TV went behind the scenes to get an exclusive look at how the World Golf Tour made the virtual version of the Britiish Open golf course in this video.

World Golf Tour has been virtually recreating famous golf courses and putting on virtual tournaments simulating famous golf tournaments such as the the Virtual U.S. Open for a few years now. They embarked on re-creating the Royal St George's Golf Club last year using a combination of high resolution digital photography and advanced mapping and surveying technologies such as photogrammetry, LIDAR and laser ground surveys to create accurate maps of the course including terrain accurate putting surfaces and eagle eye views of the course.  World Golf Tour's goals was three-fold - to achieve amazing and accurate photorealism, to allow anybody with a web browser and an open Internet connection to have access and play, and to be allow golf players to socialize with other players from around the world and let them meet and play with new people in friendly and/or real competition and chat about their favorite sport.

To achieve an accurate and photorealistic course, World Golf Tour created terrain meshes combining thousands of digital photographs with various surveying information brought back from their various surveying equipment and techniques. World Golf Tour had to build and develop several proprietary technologies that were integrated with their digital cameras to allow them to know where each camera was pointed and where it was located allowing them to align and tediously piece together thousands of photos to their mapping and surveying information.