Dear Bastiaan,
I recommend that you ignore the "sense" that your "feeling" of the distance to the target is fading. Your phrasing the issue in terms of "vision" of the distance is the problem.
Your body knowledge of distance only partially comes from visual imagery when sighting from behind the ball. It actually builds up during the whole time you're on the green with the putt waiting for you. Your internal sense of the shape and contour of the green as a whole and the specific distance from ball to hole get soaked up by the golfer over the (typical) course of three to five minutes the group of golfers arrives at the green from the fairway. Walking on the green while looking at the ball and hole teaches you a lot; walking uphill from ball to hole teaches you a lot; studying the area around the hole and walking between the ball and hole teaches you a lot, walking behind the ball to sight the line from a distance about the same as the putt's length teaches you a lot; walking from there up to the ball teaches you a lot. All of this is teaching your body, and "this" is not really "vision" -- it's your sequence of movements around the green and the putt. Mostly locomotion, but also head turns and gaze directings. You are teaching your body with your movements, not by the visual imagery alone, or even principally.
Imagine being a blind golfer playing alone facing a straight, level putt of X feet in length. How would this golfer go about teaching his body the sort of stroke he needed for distance control? Aside from appreciating green speed, the golfer would walk from the ball to the hole and back with his normal stride and then back at the ball he would generate an internal sense of how far off the hole is from the ball, probably with a neck turn.
What you are experiencing is likely something similar to "withdrawal" symptoms from the nice "image" seen from behind the ball no longer comforting you. The truth is that that image is not all that helpful to touch. beside the ball, what your brain wants and needs is not really an image in the conscious mind, but an abiding sense of where things are around you. So long as you remember what the green looks like and where the hole or target is located from the position at address, you don't need a conscious image or "vision" for touch.
What the body is coordinating in touch is not visual but physical -- how to generate a movement of the body that coincides with the body's sense of relative location.
I would suggest you try two drills to convice yourself and to learn more about this non-visual basis of touch.
First, don't go behind the ball at all. Just setup at a ball, turn the head to a set distance, and putt the ball so that the ball stops where intended. Do this twice, then close your eyes, turn the head as if the eyes were open to look that distance down the line, and repeat the same putt. Then putt three or four balls to a new and different distance from the same setup spot, all with eyes closed and turning the head with eyes closed to "see" the distance physically, just repeating the same stroke for touch. Then, with eyes still closed for each stroke and not looking down the line at all, putt one ball to distance X, then putt a second ball 3 feet farther, then putt a third ball 3 feet farther than the last, etc., as many as you want.
Second, target the distance from behind the ball, then setup and close your eyes and "see" only the image you saw standing behind the ball, in your "mind's eye." Don't look down the target line or even turn the head down the line with eyes closed -- instead, just putt based on your internal image.
In my experience, this set of exercises will show you that the behind-the-ball conscious image is less effective than the closed-eyes head-turning sort of targeting as the end of a complete ensemble of targeting movements while on the green, and also that using this head-turn for touch as the capstone for the targeting motions -- even with the eyes closed -- is substantially superior to trying to hold onto an internal image in the conscious mind and let that image be the source of your body's knowledge of distance. Basically, the conscious image MIGHT help or enhance the already-existing and independent sense of where things are as known in the body, but the latter is fundamental and the former only supplementary at best, and distracting and wrong at worse. On balance, no image in mind is probably better than a sometimes-helpful, sometimes-hurtful image.
If you feel the need for an image in conscious mind of the distance and target, in a visual sense, to deal with conscious unease about the target distance, then you just haven't yet convinced yourself that the sense of distance is built up over several minutes and is securely persistent when you are in the course of executing your routine. The unease is really a habit of wanting a security blanket you don't need, so ignore it until it goes away.
The website for IGT Golf is by Peter Royce, a contributor and regular visitor to the PuttingZone, and a person I've been working with over the past several months in helping him develop his training aid. I was a little surprised to see Dave Pelz featured prominently on the website, as the whole point of the training aid is to help golfers with something Pelz has never helped them with. As Dr. Williams observed in his 1969 book, The Science of the Golf Swing, putting gurus typically explain in great overblown scientific detail all physical and mental aspects of the putting stroke, and it usually boils down to nothing more specific than the advice to move the putter face squarely thru the ball down the line, to which the golfing student justly retorts, "Yes, yes, all that is fine, but when are you going to tell me HOW to do that?" That's exactly what I've been doing for the past four or five years, and that's what helped Peter develop his idea. Actually, my friend Damon Lucas first came up with the idea of using a laser across the chest to aim at a wall and thus monitor the motion of the shoulders during a vertical-plane stroke, several months before Peter Royce contacted me. Peter Royce independently came up with this idea and then invested his money and time to make the training aid a reality. I've been helping him and supporting him in his effort freely for months now, so I guess I am thankful he gives me a link on his website. I think the aid captures fairly well the sort of vertical-plane motion of the shoulders that I teach for explaining HOW to make a straight shoulder-stroke putt with a simple repeating motion, so I applaud Peter and his effort, and support him, and wish him success, and will try to help him in the future.
However, I have often encouraged Peter to redesign his training aid so that the golfer can view the stroke's laser indicator running in a line along the ground at his feet, so the golfer has the feedback in view and doesn't have to look up to see the laser beam moving on a wall. Also, it would be nice if this aid were useable without a wall -- another reason to have a feature running along the ground.
In the meantime, this is one of a number of ways to "train" HOW to make a straight putt using the vertical-plane shoulder stroke, but it's sort of the earliest of a number of other approaches to come.
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Theorist and Instructor
Geoff Mangum's PuttingZone
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