In an attempt to help fans familiarize with the 2009 US Open Golf Course at Bethpage, the United States Golf Association has teamed up with a San Francisco tech startup called World Golf Tour (WGT) to create an online version of the golf course that lets fans “play” the U.S. Open. Fans can go to here to play the virtual Bethpage course for free.

With a crew of 18 people, the WGT team took more than 100,0000 photographs of the course back in last September. The team measured sunlight, shadows, wind speed at various points of day, took laser scans, and overlaid all the data on the photography.

“It’s a fully functional physics engine as advanced as any console game out there,” says Cheng. “But instead of drawing objects and surfaces, we take photographs and bend them into a 3D world.” The result is an immaculate recreation of the course with none of the cartoon-y feeling of console golf games; every shot plays as it would in real life.