Anyone walking into the new $1.3 billion stadium for the New York Yankees  is bound to be amazed by the size of the center field LED scoreboard, as the first photos of the screen reveal.

Taken by a local CBS affiliate in New York, the pics show early tests of the 103-by-58-foot, 1080p HDMitsubishi Diamond Vision LED display, which is six times larger than the screen at old Yankee Stadium. According to Mitsubishi, the display is embedded with 8,601,600 LED lamps (covering a total of 5,925 square feet), and can put up to four simultaneous images, with picture-in-picture capabilities.

Some fans are worried that the screen will overshadow the game itself. Since it’s located at the same height as the stadium’s second deck and seems to occupy a quarter of the whole outfield façade, this seems quite possible. That is prime viewing position for nearly everyone inside (including the players), and it’s only natural to continually glance over at a giant flickering thing rather than the serene pastoral slowness of the game.

So you’d think that with that enormous screen, umpires will be using it with the new replay system, right? Alas, no.

According to Major League Baseball, teams are forbidden from showing “a replay of any play that could incite either team or the fans.” Judgment calls will continue being made by the umps, as they always have. It’s possible that once a play has been decided, the scoreboard will show versions of disputed plays, but with a screen that size, any possible mistake by the umps could be compounded.

The giant screen is part of a big display tech development for the new Stadium, which also includes about 1,400 other video screens of all sizes, and about 550 of them are flat-panel Sony Bravias.

All displays will be managed by an IP-based network from Cisco Systems. Every one of those TVs will have a singular IP address that can be manipulated for specific MPEG-4 compressed video.

Expect the system to be used to sell ads within the stadium and to show awkward baseball-themed marriage proposals.

Last but not least, big-screen specialist Daktronics also built a video/scoring system that manages a 1,280-foot long color LED ribbon board mounted to the facade of the second deck and will be one of the longest continuous displays in sports. Just like the giant Times Square screen, the LED ribbon board is made out of hundreds of smaller LED ‘cubes.’ This one will show lineups and other team info and will occasionally show psychedelic light shows during the night. (see pic below)

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. researchers said on Thursday they have found a way to make large-scale flexible display screens that can be stretched to fit the contours of a bus yet are transparent enough so riders can see out windows.

The thin, light screens might be used to make brake light indicators that follow the contours of a car, or health monitors or imaging devices that wrap around a patient like a blanket, said John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose study appears in the journal Science.

He said the large display screens combine the scale and durability of light-emitting diodes, or LED technology, used to make flat, lighted billboards, with the flexibility of screens made using organic — carbon-containing — materials.

“If you look at these giant billboard displays along the road side, those are made out of inorganic light emitting diodes (LEDs). Our feeling is those systems are quite impressive,” Rogers said in a telephone interview.

“The question became is it possible to take that technology and use it in a non-billboard format.”

Rogers said current technology using inorganic materials produces chunky individual LED lights that need to be arranged piecemeal with a robotic arm. Screens made using organic materials can be sprayed or painted onto a film surface, but they are not as bright or durable, he said.

To solve this challenge, researchers built their LEDs on a thin layer of film later dissolved by a chemical and then affixed tiny plastic tabs on two corners to ensure the LEDs did not wash away in the chemical bath.

The team used a special stamping technology to deposit and assemble the inorganic LEDs onto glass, plastic or rubber surfaces. The system works much like a rubber stamp and ink pad, using the LEDs as ink.

“The new approach can lift large numbers of small, thin LEDs from the wafer in one step, and then print them onto a substrate in another step,” Rogers said.

The LEDs can be interconnected and wired with a conventional process used to wire computer chips, he added. And because LEDs can be placed far apart and still provide enough light, the panels and displays can be nearly transparent.

“We can put them on a strip of plastic and make brake lights,” said Rogers, who noted that the project was initially funded in part by Ford Motor Co, which was looking for a way to make brake lights that can follow the contour of a car.

The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy also funded the project.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Paul Simao)

At a time when the outdoor advertising industry is looking to digital signage for growth while municipalities increasingly look at restricting digital signs, a new study indicates there is no correlation between digital signs and accident rates. A study by Tantala Associates, paid for by the industry-funded Foundation for Outdoor Advertising Research and Education, analyzed about 18,000 traffic accidents in the Rochester, N.Y., area over a five-year period. It found no correlation between traffic accidents and digital signage, with data actually showing a tiny decrease in accidents within a half-mile radius of digital billboards. Similar results were found two years ago in a study by Virginia Tech’s Center for Automotive Safety Research, which found that behavior patterns did not change substantially in the presence of digital signs. For more information, contact David Hickey.

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