Lawn Striping To Lawn Patterning To Printing Logo’s on Grass…The Evolution!
Lawn striping evolution
Lawn striping is often equated to vacuum cleaner type tracks left in the wake of turf mowing equipment. Historically, lawn stripes and simple geometric shapes started with rollers that were retrofitted onto sports field equipment. The purpose was to use reflected light from these tracks to enhance the esthetics of turf. Fast forward and learn from David Mellor’s book Picture Perfect. Mellor is arguably responsible for migrating stripes into art forms on sports fields.
Today, David and others like John Ledwidge are among today’s most creative groundskeepers. They push the limits of capability to bring surprise and delight to sporting events that include, baseball, football, golf, soccer, rugby, polo and motorplexs. As experts make visual gains on their canvas, complexity and content of their messages have human limitations. Unfortunately fans and marketing groups have no foreseeable limit on uptake and leveraging, respectively. Inventiveness will always prevail where there is will and a way.
“Today, David and others like John Ledwidge are among today’s most creative groundskeepers. They push the limits of capability to bring surprise and delight to sporting events that include, baseball, football, golf, soccer, rugby, polo and motorplexs.”
Next generation turf patterning
Historical examples of similar, evolutionary transitions can be humorously applied here. Let’s take a trip way back in time and visualize ancient walls decorated with crude scratchings. These early renderings were gazed upon with amazement and onlookers couldn’t imagine anything more pleasing. This held true until inventiveness yielded paints and textiles. Plentiful (modern) utensils and mediums increased the number of artists and expanded their capabilities. Back on 20th century turf. Limitation with complexity, labor intensity and processing time call for inventiveness, replace rollers, brooms, string lines and blue prints with a machine. A machine, a super large-scale printer that delivers perfectly oriented turf (blades) to a field instead of dots of ink to paper. To gain better perspective, consider the monitor you are now viewing. It is using uses about 160 dots or pixels per inch to transfer limitless information to your eye. Each pixel is about twice the width of a single hair. Now stretch your monitor 250 times to cover a soccer field and now each pixel should be about the size of a golf ball. The new process for printing on turf should be capable of rapidly changing each small patch/pixel of turf from reflected or non reflected orientation or “lay”. All of this is happening along the width of the machine’s printing “head” and while it is traveling forward at a brisk pace. So, now all that is needed is a guidance system, computer for processing instructions based on location and a digital image file so the control can access the desired commands.
Economics of patterning with air and light
The resulting machine and process will deliver limitless information with sufficient resolution and speed to transform an entire football field and end zones in less than 3 hours. The machine creates reflection based, HD patterns using the soft touch of air. We listened to sports marketing experts, groundskeepers and players to come up with a process that delivers unrestricted flexibility without affecting play of the ball and will not damage the turf, simplicity at its finest.
Lawn stripes evolve to marketing billboards
Evolution or revolution is occurring today in the sports industry, we see it as painted signage; superimposed digital graphics showing franchise, corporate logos or advertisements. Painted signage requires expensive templates, is labor intensive, damages the turf and difficult to remove. Electronic superimposed imaging is implanted by the telecast production company and most likely controlled and monetized by the venue. It is not seen by the fans and therefore adds no direct marketing (to the audience) and therefore casts no social media benefits. TurfPrinting with air is agreeably not “in your face” and can be viewed as dynamic entertainment, can be changed or erased in the same amount of time. The venue’s marketing department, not the telecast production marketers, owns the graphical product. NewGround Technology Inc. redefining marketing, promotion and surprise and delight for fans to enjoy and socialize over.
“Evolution or revolution is occurring today in the sports industry, we see it as painted signage; superimposed digital graphics showing franchise, corporate logos or advertisements.”