SGA‑OISOpen Interoperability Standard
1.0 Draft
Open Interoperability Standard

Every shot. Every round. One standard.

SGA-OIS lets every device in a simulator bay share what it knows: the launch monitor, the simulator, club sensors, cameras. Every shot and round becomes a record of what was measured, how, and by whom, so it can count toward a player rating, a statistic or a tournament result on any bay.

15documents
204fields
4fields make a launch monitor conformant
$0license fees

What this standard is for

A simulator bay already measures a golf shot more precisely than anything on a real course. What it has not had is a common language. Today a simulator works with the devices its vendor has chosen to integrate. With SGA-OIS, any simulator can work with any launch monitor, camera or sensor that speaks the standard, automatically. That even includes the player’s own equipment: pull a club from a bag that reads RFID tags, and the simulator can switch to that club without anyone touching a menu. And the measurement travels on — to another vendor’s software, to a player rating system, to a competition — carrying enough about how it was measured that somebody downstream can decide what it is worth.

It works because every device declares what it can provide and what it wants to receive, so data flows both ways: the simulator learns ball speed and spin from the launch monitor, and tells the launch monitor that the next player up swings left-handed. The SGA Engine matches those declarations into a connection matrix, passes each value to the devices that asked for it, and composes one tamper-evident record per stroke, with every value attributed to the device that supplied it. The engine routes and records; it never decides whether a shot or a round counts.

Join on your terms: extend the standard within your own namespace or work with the community to extend the common namespace, and pair your products only with each other if you like. But accept one other company’s device and you accept them all (governance).

How far a result can be trusted

A finished record is only as trusted as the lowest level in its chain: the launch monitor, the simulator, and the bay it was played in. One weak link sets the level for the whole result.

levelhow a device gets therehow a bay gets theregood for
A0 OpenAnyone implements the standard. No account, no agreement.Nobody has claimed it.Casual play, personal statistics
A1 PartnerIts maker becomes a technology partner: they promise never to falsify data or build a feature that helps a player cheat, and to tell SGA about any way they find that would allow either. They also publish a fingerprint (digest) of each release, so SGA can check the software in the bay is the software they shipped.Its owner claims it and agrees not to tamper with it.SGA Player Rating, leagues
A2 SignedA1, plus the device signs what it sends with a key SGA has registered, kept where it is hard to extract.Certified by SGA at an A2 level.Sanctioned events
A3 HardwareA2, with the key in hardware nobody can read it out of.Certified by SGA at an A3 level.Championships

Each level adds proof that a device is who it says it is, and unlocks more of what a result can count for. Leagues and tournaments can be run by bay owners, simulator companies, clubs and charities, or SGA itself, and each one states the lowest level it accepts. The normative rule is in spec 02 §2.3.

Four things it insists on

The specification

 documentwhat it settles
00ConventionsUnits, sign conventions, time, identifiers and versioning, and the two things a bay may never do: hold a member’s identity or judge a round.
01ProvenanceEvery value is measured, calculated or inferred, and why that label belongs to a firmware build.
02Identity, attestation, and the trust chainWho stands behind each device and bay, trust levels A0–A3, and why a result takes the lowest level in its chain.
03Capability handshake and the connection matrixHow devices describe themselves, how the engine connects producers to consumers, and how one record is composed per stroke.
04The standard as a signed, distributable artifactThe standard as a signed bundle, and how a bay stays current while offline.
05Deployment and the privilege boundaryThe privilege boundary: what the engine does without elevation, and why it never needs more.
06The shot recordWhat one shot record carries: course identity, lie, environment, trajectory, putting and the scorecard.
07Offline operation, store-and-forward, and presencePhones as couriers for offline bays, and proving a player was present.
08Competition conformanceEvent rules packages, settings attestation and identity assurance for competition.
09Transport, sessions, and latencyPersistent sessions, framing and keepalive, the cloud uplink and its fallback ladder, and the latency budget.
10The bay capability profileWhat a bay can prove about its equipment, connectivity, presence and cameras.
11Media captureSwing clips from a ring buffer, camera exclusivity, consent and retention.
12NoticesHow the engine tells players what it sees going wrong while it can still be fixed.
13Device lifecycle: admission, updates, enrollmentKeeping a device current, refusing a dangerous one, and attaching one to a bay.
14The bay certificate, and enforcing a tierCarrying a certification decision back to the bay, and what it may not be taken to mean.

Reference

Connecting your device / software

Technology partners

Everything above is free to read, implement and ship. You do not need an account to use the specification, run the conformance kit, or sell a product that speaks SGA-OIS.

A technology partner account is also free and has no approval queue. It adds the SGA Reference Simulator — a complete bay on one machine to develop against — engine builds for every platform, schema extension tooling, and a named contact at SGA who understands your project and integration. It is also how you reach level A1: you agree never to falsify data or build cheating features, to report any way you find that would allow either, and you publish a fingerprint of each release. That is where rounds start counting toward an SGA Player Rating. Signing (A2, A3) builds on it.

Simulated Golf Association · SGA-OIS · generated from the specification sources