Topgolf is more than just a driving range. It’s the high-tech golf experience of the future. It’s the biggest breakthrough in gamified recreation facilities since the bowling alley (I’m sorry axe-throwing, you’re just too awkward and too dangerous).

Forget about the actual golf for a second, each bay comes with individual temperature controls, built-in phone chargers, and TVs with tons of channels. There’s even personalized table service for food and drinks. Which means you only need to get up for two things: to go to the bathroom, and to swing a motherfucking golf club.

And swinging the golf club is where all the interesting stuff really begins. Because apart from all the perfected pampering, Topgolf is backed by some seriously sophisticated computing.

Behind every drive is two different golf ball tracking technologies, combined to provide you the most realistic and enjoyable experience possible. One system catalogs your ball, finds where it lands, and awards you points, while there’s another, totally separate system that tracks your ball through the air and displays the flight path on the TV in your bay.

To accomplish all this, each Topgolf ball is embedded with an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip. And all the targets scattered along the range? They’re lined with speedway readers, capable of scanning thousands of balls a second. There’s a reader in each bay too, earmarking which ball is yours, ensuring you, and only you, get 75 points when you hit the back wall.

But that doesn’t tell a complete story. You hit a ball and suddenly a score shows up, where’s the journey? Enter TopTracer: Topgolf’s proprietary golf ball tracking visualization technology. Originally developed for televised golf broadcasts, TopTracer is finely tuned to track small white objects on an otherwise plain background like the sky. It’s a one trick pony. It literally can’t do anything else.

TopTracer is still used on networks like CBS, ESPN, and the Golf Channel, but it’s been further revolutionized for Topgolf. PGA Tour broadcasts utilize this tech for one drive, overlaying the flight path in a single high-def camera shot. Whereas at Topgolf your drive is being recorded by hundreds of cameras at various angles.

With such extensive coverage TopTracer can composite multiple flight paths, mapping your drive in simulated 3D space. And that opens the door for all kinds of cool camera movement and effects, which is how you end up playing Angry Birds at the driving range.

So when you think of the future, don’t think flying cars or teleportation, it won’t be any of that. It won’t be technology that BIG.

It’ll be stupid little distractions like Topgolf.