Facilities: Halo Effect

The horn sounds at Intuit Dome and a timeout begins. The lights in the new venue’s seating bowl darken and a golden orb named The Mentalist appears on the Halo Board, the largest double-sided video board ever hung in an arena.

The Mentalist challenges Intuit Dome fans to a game, to guess which color he’s thinking. Fans, sitting in seats that the Clippers hardwired with power and a four-button gamepad on the right armrest, press the color button corresponding to their guess: Red, blue, green, or yellow. Each fan’s selection is indicated by outward facing lights embedded in his or her seat’s armrest. The four colors dot the darkened arena.

When the round’s voting ends, the correct color is revealed and the fans who guessed incorrectly are eliminated. Their seat lights turn off, while the ones who guessed correctly play The Mentalist’s next round. This continues until the timeout concludes and the NBA action resumes.  

Sometimes, the fans (or a fan) win; sometimes, it’s the video board. Regardless, The Mentalist combines several of the game presentation elements that put Intuit Dome in a class of its own: The massive, Daktronics-built Halo Board’s ability to ingest data from the crowd and react to it, paired with the venue’s custom seats. It’s an engaging, theater-type experience that renders traditional Kiss Cams almost laughably corny in comparison. 

“We’ve tried to re-imagine even the traditional stuff that people love and use the tech in the building and take it to the next level,” said Clippers Chief Marketing Officer Claudia Calderon, who oversees game presentation.   

Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s purist vision of a live NBA fan experience means there are many boundary-pushing aspects of Intuit Dome — the extent to which it leans on biometric identification, an entirely autonomous F&B market setup, the well-documented number of restrooms, and The Wall supporters section. But the Clippers have a unique opportunity to influence live sports in-game entertainment because of the nearly $100 million Halo Board, a toy no arena has ever had. Measuring roughly an acre in square footage, the Halo sports 233 million LEDs — average NBA arena center-hung scoreboards have between 30 and 50 million — and quadruple the computing power of the average NBA arena center-hung. The scale, combined with 4K resolution, means its images are life-like and cinematic. 

The Halo itself doesn’t contain artificial intelligence, but its systems contain machine learning tech that reacts to data received from sensors in the seating bowl. That capability will be sharpened over time, resulting in the board more clearly responding to the crowd’s energy, like during a Clippers scoring run.  

“It’s the man behind the curtain almost, it is the engine that powers the building,” said Clippers Chief Technology Officer George Hanna. 

No team has ever had as much physical canvas in an arena to work with, which inherently requires new forms of content and expensive equipment and processes required to make it. Unlike The Sphere, which has encountered the same challenges, the Clippers are trying to make sure the Halo’s content is additive to basketball games and concerts, and not the sole focus. But even just a month into the first NBA season at Intuit Dome, the impact that the Halo Board will have on the arena, and the sports industry, is already becoming apparent. 

“Now it’s fun to watch where it goes,” said Ben Casey, CEO of Spinifex, the company helping the Clippers and Daktronics create content for the Halo. “The biggest concern of ‘will it work’ has been addressed and now the question is how nuanced can we get with all these tools to fulfill on the incredible potential in the Intuit Dome.” 

Fans use gamepads wired into the armrests of their seats to play games such as The Mentalist.pablo cabrera

Non-compete

Prowling around the two-story catwalk positioned above the Halo Board is one way to get an appreciation for the board’s size and capabilities.  

Sitting more than a hundred feet above the Intuit Dome floor, the catwalk is wider than any in the NBA. The structure is so substantial — to the point that it’s probably tolerable for most people scared of heights — because the Halo Board’s four pieces can’t be lowered to the floor for maintenance like smaller arena scoreboards. Combined, the board and the associated rigging grids, catwalks and appended gadgets all hanging from the Intuit Dome roof weigh a million pounds. 

The catwalk railings are lined with speakers, robotic lights, decibel readers, compressed air blasters, T-shirt cannons, WiFi and DAS antennae, American and Canadian flags, and miles of cabling and wiring, sitting atop dozens of steel beams labeled “5,000 lb load capacity.” It’s this collection of technology and infrastructure that gives the Halo Board power to influence fans’ experiences in the building and makes it such a central part of the Clippers’ in-game show.  

The Halo Board isn’t “just an object that shows things that are happening in the game,” said Calderon. “We have to think about how you’re going to leverage this tool you have at your disposal. Probably at other places it is a consideration but not the main driver.”  

When Casey and Spinifex first met with the Clippers about the Halo Board, they were expecting they’d be asked to deliver an immersion-focused, spectacle-type impact on the game experience. That was the opposite of what the Clippers and Ballmer wanted in the $2.3 billion, privately financed venue.  

“The tool set is so impressive, they made such a significant investment,” Casey said. “There is a lot to play with here, but it could become overpoweringly competitive with what’s going on with the court. We have to use it wisely.”    

Even for Spinifex, a tech-infused storytelling agency native to the entertainment world, creating content for the Halo Board was a daunting undertaking. An acre of high-resolution LEDs to work with was one thing, but, unlike the 30-minute Disney theme park shows that Spinifex has created, NBA games at Intuit Dome could happen several times in a week, lasting two and a half hours, with shifting plots, main characters, and outcomes. 

And then there is the act of simply uploading content into the video board’s system. In the earliest stages of Halo Board content development, Spinifex realized it would take 51 days to render basic files. And even with some creative workarounds, a 30-second clip for the Halo can be as large as 150 gigabytes. For context, every personal Gmail account comes with 15GB of free storage. Learning how to better cope with huge file sizes will enable the team and its content creators to fully unleash the Halo Board.

Spinifex and the Clippers are creating a coherent — and more cinematic — story arc across the entire experience, using, in this case, the “coming wave” concept continually found throughout the building but especially in content on the Halo Board, including the powerful player introductions segment in which the board’s full force is felt. Creating a coherent visual and sound identity for Clippers games at the Intuit Dome helps fans get familiar with the presentation and build their own rituals, Casey said, without borrowing from decades of NBA arena game presentation tradition.  

“This is all about delivering an ownable experience for fans and for the players, current and future, so that they feel they have an incredible wave of momentum behind their back,” he said.  

Player stats and live video are displayed during game action.getty images

Ready to react 

One way to prevent the Halo Board from distracting Clippers fans during the action was to instead make it a resource for them. When the ball is in play, statistics, live game action, and replays all sit in their own distinct regions of the board. Through the course of a game, even first-time visitors get accustomed to where certain information or replays exist.  

With so much dedicated space for each content type, multicamera replays are routinely shown while the game is underway. The heads of the five Clippers players on the court at a given time appear in a Mount Rushmore-like presentation in a dedicated portion of the Halo Board. When one of them scores, his head rises over the others with a “+1” or “+2” or “+3” above it, depending on the points scored. Made Clippers free throws feature sound effects reminiscent of Super Mario Brothers. 

One of Ballmer’s pet peeves in traveling to other NBA arenas was the difficulty he had reading small number and letter fonts on center-hung scoreboards. On the Halo Board, players’ full last names are listed in the ever-present box score in large type; fans no longer need to cross-reference an unknown player’s number with his team’s roster. 

Because center-hung scoreboards have never had this kind of real estate, showing replays traditionally meant that stats or other information disappeared, however briefly.  

“And I think that’s the biggest thing,” said Daktronics Project Manager Luke Tingle. “The Clippers don’t have to interrupt anything because they have so much canvas.” 

Intuit Dome is demonstrating the value of additional video board real estate but also of running power to each of its 18,000 seats, another sports venue novelty. Fans could use that power to charge their phones, though Ballmer would prefer they didn’t need them at all. At Intuit Dome, the chair arm gamepad connects fans to the main video board, something that, to this point, has only happened through fans scanning a QR code with their phone.

The hardwired seats, custom built by DreamSeat and PixMob, enable the chair lights to be used for an entire game, showing, for example, the loudest section of the arena (using decibel measuring) during a timeout. Even PixMob Chief Operating Officer Jean-Olivier Dalphond has been surprised at how much the lights are woven into the Clippers’ run of show. The team hosted the Toronto Raptors recently and was able to flip all chair lights to red and white during the Canadian national anthem, a small but notable illustration of how the lights can shape the arena’s environment. 

“It feels like it was always there. It’s like a natural thing,” Dalphond said. “I think the light is really there to make it feel more alive, to trigger even more energy into the audience because it’s all around you.”  

Increasingly, the goal is for the Halo Board to react more often to the energy emanating from the crowd, what Casey calls “surge programming.” That could lead to the Halo Board turning fiery red during a Clippers scoring run that ignites the crowd in a way that’s more intuitive and spur of the moment than traditional center-hung scoreboards that rely on loaded content. Many NBA arenas are collecting real-time data, but don’t have the processing power to generate feedback.

“That’s been a key feature of this experience that will change the dynamic of how things are developed and architected,” said Casey. “You’re really on the edge of this. If you have a live sporting event and a crowd and you have this amazing tool in your venue, you want that thing to be responsive and pick up on the way things are going.” 

The catwalk above the Halo Board is also larger than any other in the NBA.bret mccormick

Tip of the iceberg 

Like Spinifex and Hanna, who came from Disney, Calderon’s background is not in traditional sports venue operations. She joined the Clippers from Pepsi, where she worked in sports sponsorship as chief marketing officer of the company’s West Division. Calderon was a little skeptical when she was first asked: “If you could do anything with the Halo Board, what would you do?” 

“I come from a place where you’re always trying to do the right thing for the consumer, but you’ve got shareholders. And so, you’re trying to go, ‘This is the optimal formula but if you can save a penny, you can get really close but not all the way to what the consumer wanted,’ and you’re always battling those decisions,” she said. “And here it’s always fundamentally, ‘If it’s the right thing for the fan, we’re going to do it.’ It was such an amazing experience to be part of that because you felt like you could really push the boundaries, really think differently, and if it was the right thing you were going to find a way to make it come to life.” 

So far, the Clippers have unveiled four original Halo Board games, including The Mentalist. Hanna wouldn’t say how many games the Clippers and their collaborators have created, though it is more than four.  

“It’s not a process where we’ve said we’ve got these 20 ideas, and we’re locked and we’re going,” Calderon said. “You’ll see our content evolve over the season.” 

The Clippers were cagey on what they’ll unveil next with the Halo Board, but Casey hinted at Spinifex’s own work with Olympics opening ceremonies and those events’ tendency to transition between digital and physical experiences where “there is true magic.” The Halo Board’s version of the classic T-shirt toss, in which its T-shirt cannons launched shirts into the crowd just as Clippers players shown on the video board made a tossing motion, already went viral. 

Sponsors haven’t deeply engaged with the Halo Board yet, either. Calderon said Clippers sponsors have been pitched the possibility of full-board takeovers for cinematic advertising. None has taken the opportunity yet but that will change as more corporate decision makers wrap their heads around the board’s capabilities.  

In the meantime, the Halo Board’s content creators will continue working to lessen the time needed to create usable files, something that should push the industry forward as more boards with higher processing muscle are built and deployed in the coming years. Not only creating more interactive content that feeds off the crowd, like The Mentalist, but in shorter time frames.   

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg,” said Tingle. “This is the simplest form that they can utilize this technology and it’s all software and there are going to be some amazing things that they come out and use that for.”