How the NBA built its 27-million pixel floor for the NBA All- ...

BY Nate Berg4 minute read

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The typically flashy events surrounding the NBA All-Star Game just got exponentially flashier. Other than the game itself, the courts hosting events, including the Slam Dunk and Three Point contests, will not just be played on the typical glossy hardwood flooring, but on a glass-covered, LED-infused, color-spewing video mega-screen.

Debuting for the celebrity game, the court will essentially become a centralized Jumbotron beneath the players&#; feet&#;capable of displaying graphics, video replays, player-tracking animations, and interactive games. It&#;s a hyper-saturated visual eruption that could revolutionize the way sports are presented in arenas and on television broadcasts.

The technology behind this visual flood is called LumiFlex, a 27-million-pixel LED screen that sits beneath a glass sport-court surface that&#;s been developed over decades. Built by German company ASB GlassFloor, the video floor is a high-tech version of the glass floor ASB has been providing for squash courts since the s.

&#;In the last 200 years, not much has changed in sport flooring,&#; says Christof Babinsky, general manager of ASB GlassFloor, and son of the company&#;s founder. His father cornered the squash-flooring business in Germany by providing glass-based floors that proved more consistent and resilient than conventional wood floors (they are capable of lasting for upwards of 70 years). As technology advanced, the company realized it could use LEDs beneath its glass to display the lines used on sports-based courts&#;wide lines for a tennis match one day, a curved three-point line for basketball the next.

Around , Babinsky says the company had a realization: &#;If we can do LED lines, we can do screens.&#; That led to the development of LumiFlex. Hoisted by forklift into an arena, the floor consists of an aluminum chassis system, hundreds of square LED screens about the size of floor tiles, and larger sheets of ASB&#;s proprietary glass surfacing laid on top. The surface is two layers of safety glass, each about a half-inch thick, laminated together. The glass is an opaque blue, but over a sea of LEDs, it fills with any color at up to a 4K resolution. In the same way an idle computer screen looks black until it&#;s activated, the blue glass flooring comes to life when the LED screens below are turned on.

Initially, various sports governing bodies were concerned that the thickness of the glass surface might distort the lines projected upward onto the court, but testing has shown that the resolution is remarkable. The floor has been certified for use by international sports bodies covering basketball, volleyball, and handball, and have been assessed for in-game performance on factors like absorption, ball rebound, slip resistance, and friction.

An internal-bracing system reduces the flexibility of the glass, which is actually 80% more elastic than a hardwood floor. In production, tiny ceramic dots are baked into the glass, spaced to provide grip and friction, similar to the textured finish of a sealed hardwood floor. So while running and pivoting on an all-glass floor might sound like a good way to take a spill, Babinsky says the grip is actually safer for athletes, whose rubber soles can sometimes stick on conventional court floors. In fact, ASB insists that its high-tech flooring is as safe, if not safer, than hardwood court surfaces.

The LumiFlex system was first used in competition last summer during the U19 Women&#;s Basketball World Cup in Madrid. Babinsky says that proof-of-concept caught the interest of the Basketball Bundesliga, the premier league of pro club basketball in Germany, which used the technology in its season opener. That, in turn, led the NBA to reach out.

By last November, ASB met with the NBA to discuss how they could use the high-tech video-floor system for this year&#;s All-Star weekend events, being held in Indianapolis. &#;We put together a shopping list of what we could do,&#; says Babinsky, and the NBA selected almost everything on the list. The spectacle on display will include full-court graphics, instant replays, and interactive player-tracking technology that can show the paths taken by players on particularly impressive runs.

The advent of embeddable LEDs has changed the game for the company. While the movie-screen-of-a-floor used at this weekend&#;s events shows the technology&#;s cool extremes, it can also be useful in more practical settings. One LED-based floor the company produces for multisport courts has the seemingly magical feature of showing only the court lines needed for the sport being played (rather than a rainbow of spaghetti lines and curves for everything from volleyball to pickleball to squash). One installation at Oxford University has preprogrammed lines for nine different sports.

The NBA installation shows that the floor can do even more than that, Babinsky says, especially when player-tracking and interactive elements are used. ASB GlassFloor has developed applications for the system to be used in sports training, with moving dots on the floor that can run players through drills, for example. Babinsky says the team fine-tuned the speed of the display by driving a remote-control toy race car across the surface.

In the hands of creative coaches&#;or dance instructors, theatre directors, or filmmakers&#;this type of interactive display surface could become a powerful training and rehearsal tool. While NBA&#;s installation at its exhibition-leaning All-Star Game is more about the fan experience, Babinsky says the court&#;s bigger impact may happen before the game even starts.

&#;If we can do live replays on the floor and use AI to tell people why they should have been three feet further to the left, and they can see that and visualize that on the court, that has a lot of advantages for coaches and players,&#; he says.

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The NBA has unveiled the designs of its 30 In-Season Tournament playing courts, with mandatory leaguewide aesthetics that include fully painted floors for the first time, a superimposed image of the NBA Cup trophy at midcourt, and contrasting-colored runways from foul line to foul line. Each team was asked to augment its alternate court with proprietary City Edition colors and logos, and a noteworthy outcome is that the Celtics will play their first-ever home game without a parquet floor. In a three-and-a-half-month initiative driven by the league&#;s creative services group and Head of On-Court & Brand Partnerships Christopher Arena -- along with major input from Commissioner Adam Silver, NBA SVP/Marketing Janine Dugre and NBA President of Content & Exec Producer Gregg Winik -- each team had to either rent, unretire or refurbish a court in time for the tournament opener on Nov. 3. Arena connected teams with one of three league-approved manufacturers (Robbins Sports Services, Connor Sports and Horner Sports Flooring), and then brainstormed designs that Arena said went &#;from mild to wild.&#;&#;

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FOCUS ON THE CUP: The league ultimately chose a court motif that also includes silhouettes of the NBA Cup inside each free throw lane, team names on the baselines or wordmarks across the NBA Cup at midcourt. None of the courts were allowed to have woodgrain details -- meaning Boston could not add a parquet look -- with the idea that fans will easily differentiate tournament games from regular games. &#;Most courts in the basketball world are wood,&#;&#; Arena said. &#;And so how do we just shift that thinking so that color and the NBA Cup trophy are more a part of this? Now, no matter what camera angle you see, you're going to see that, &#;Hey, they&#;re playing for this trophy.&#; So this little part of the season will start to separate itself on Tuesdays and Fridays, and everyone will know these mean more.&#;&#; Other than the Celtics, the Lakers, Trail Blazers, Bulls and Pelicans will also be playing on their first alternate courts at home. The league recently gave several of its top players sneak previews of the designs, and Arena said they will release those player reactions on social media this week, including Suns F Kevin Durant praising the team's purple court.

NBA In-Season Tournament court designs

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