In SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, there is a flying saucer flying over the lawn and awaiting tomorrow's final of the 2022 Super Bowl. Both teams will play with more than 1.000 tons suspended above their heads.
At 120 meters long, the oval suspended nearly 40 meters (122 feet) above the pitch is, according to Samsung, the largest video screen in the history of sport (and the world). And it will make me win a bet. We bet you didn't know that this Infinity Screen had been there since mid-2020? Here you are. I won.
His first Super Bowl
The Infinity Screen is the icing on the cake of a pharaonic facility: the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood is an enormous 5 billion dollar structure shared by two NFL teams: one of them will play for the victory in the Super Bowl, which is a a kind of championship challenge in an American style. I'm joking: it would be like saying that the Beatles are a kind of K-Pop band in English style.
When the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals meet Thursday night, fans in the 70.000-seat stadium will be able to access a sea of game data thanks to the massive screen. The incredible panels ranging from 6 to 12 meters (20 to 40 feet) high will alternate instant replays, close-ups, statistics, scores and interactive updates.
A high, almost like staying at home
21.000 square meters (70.000 square feet) of ultra-high definition screen with a total of 80 million pixels on the internal and external surface, the Infinity Screen will be watched by the entire Super Bowl stadium. Fans sitting lower will look at the inside of the screen, while those higher up will see the outside.
And I won't tell you the noise of this edition of the Super Bowl: with the equivalent of 1.500 home theater speaker systems there is no possibility of missing a single referee's whistle.
Sports fans argue, sometimes rightly, that they can see better and get more game analysis from their living rooms than they could at the stadium: this is a step that could bring them back into the fold.
Aside from the rhetoric of the good fan who has fun in the open air and has a "real" experience, there will be more and more competition between the stands and the sofa. The home viewing experience has gotten so good with bigger, sharper screens that we need to raise the bar on what a live experience means. The 2022 Super Bowl promises to be an apotheosis for such a screen and stadium: something that reconciles with events.
2022 Super Bowl, a cradle for technology
The Super Bowl, the sporting event that attracts the most attention in the world, has long been a testing ground. Not only in communication (companies compete to amaze the public and secure very expensive advertising spaces), but also in technology. Already in 2017 the Fox Sports VR app made virtual reality highlights available, almost at the dawn of these devices. This year's Super Bowl will be viewable in an immersive virtual theater using the Oculus, Meta's VR viewers.
For those who still have the "old" TV, the NBC broadcaster will use a new augmented reality (AR) function to combine statistics and content produced by around 40 cameras that will film the 2022 Super Bowl match.
And then there's the Halftime Show
Among the “Extralarge” things this event offers is… intermission. A space apart, a true show within a show, which over the years has amazed like and more than some opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games and has cost millions of dollars.
This year the "nostalgia" effect will be strong, a parade of stars from the rap scene of the early 2000s: five sacred monsters of the genre (Dr. Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dog, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar) will give life to a rush of adrenaline.
