NBA All-Star Friday and Saturday activities will feature ASB Glass Floor LED courts. SVG had the opportunity to speak with Jan Weber, Head of Sales at ASB Glass Floor, to learn more about this technology and how it will impact the future of in-venue sponsorship and fan experiences. I got it.
ASB Glass Floor's Jan Weber says the new LED courts can improve not only marketing and sales, but also coaching and player performance.
Let's start with technology. What's involved?
LED panels with a pixel pitch of 4.8 mm are embedded in the basic structure of the floor, which requires a certain degree of shock absorption. The LED panel is then covered with a glass surface with a surface treatment that provides just the right amount of give and glide to ensure no compromises for athletes.
For this weekend's NBA All-Star, the screen court area will be approximately 24 million pixels.
How do you play your content?
It can connect to any graphics system you need and even has a media server. Therefore, our standard packages provide our clients with a media server, operating software, and the ability to interface with their desired third-party technology and visuals.
For example, you can create elements for opening ceremonies, halftime shows, and timeouts, and drag and drop content designed for those events. And you can do it whenever you want.
When I first heard about this, my first thought was how could I make it have similar give to a regular coat? How was it developed?
It took us a while to get there, but we are now at the top of certain criteria, with shock absorption within 65% of the best you can get on a sports floor. We had to make sure it was healthy for the players and their joints, so we did a lot of testing.
Have you watched other sports like tennis or volleyball?
Yes, it was designed for indoor sports, and volleyball in Germany was actually one of the first events to take place as an official event. And in tennis, ATP noticed it as a fast surface suitable for tennis.
Some events, such as the US Open Tennis, have a lot of space around the court. Could someone use this to turn the area around the actual playing surface into LEDs while keeping the original playing surface?
Yes, you can do it just fine, but if you're going to be doing it around a playing surface, you probably don't need this type of sophisticated surface. This is because it is designed as a playing surface.
You are selling, how does this open up new sponsorship and monetization opportunities?
You can create new inventory that didn't exist for marketing and sales. Until now, you could only paint something on the floor or put stickers on it. And with this floor, you can create a whole new sponsorship opportunity because it's a canvas that you can put anything on anywhere.
What about its use in coaching?
Yes, we also want this to be a tool for coaching, and everything you see during a standard contest, such as player tracking, is also a placeholder to enter the coaching world. Imagine a coach using his iPad to design a play on this floor and then swiping that play across the floor. And players can also see instant feedback letting them know when they're standing in the wrong place.
And now we can connect analytics and data to help players learn faster. So a coach can take data on how their next opponent has run on fastbreaks over the past five games and input that into the floor, allowing the team to: [stand on the defensive end] See what speed the players are coming at and where the ball is passed. This is just one example of its use in coaching.
