aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, February 01, 2007
1,160 pixels per square foot
I don’t watch football but I sure would like to see this field:
ALEX GOLDMARK: They call it “Turf TV” because, well, it can turn football field turf into a television.
MARK NICHOLLS: Not, you know, high definition, but it’s comparable to a regular television screen. There’s 1,160 pixels per square foot.
Mark Nicholls is CEO of Sportexe, the company that makes the field. They put fiber-optic “straws,” as he calls them, inside each little strand of fake grass. But besides that, he says it’s a normal turf field.
NICHOLLS: Plays the same, looks the same, has the same durability. The difference is is shooting up through the middle of that straw is light. And when we can determine what and in what configuration those light up in, with the push of a button it can look like a football field. And with the push of another button it can be a soccer field.
And a Saturday Night Fever-style flashing floor for a halftime show even...And fiber optics have some other potentially useful properties.
NICHOLLS: So as you walk down the field, I could essentially light your footprints behind you. When that receiver is . . . is catching the ball and sliding out of bounds, I can actually light exactly where they touched the ground.
