Pro Hockey Challenge Uses Fine Pitch LED Screen As The Target For Slapshots. It Survives.

February 10, 2021 by Dave Haynes

As a diehard Canadian, I am expected to be a rabid hockey fan – but the hard truth is I am barely aware of the NHL. I have somehow managed to retain my Canadian passport despite this.

The last NHL season, and the league’s All-Star weekend, all happened, to be totally accurate, sometime in the past. I dunno.

I did not, therefore, see this very unique and initially disturbing use of a fine pitch LED video wall during the skills challenge evening. Shooting pucks at distributed targets, to build up points, is not new, but instead of styrofoam discs mounted at the corner of a goalie net, the whole thing was done digitally.

So you had some of the NHL’s best players like Tyler Bertuzzi firing pucks at the virtual targets on the screen, which had me thinking, how will the screen survive???

The 2.5mm LED screen was brought in by the Toronto-based live events AV firm MVI-MultiVision, and the workaround that ensured the screen could be used after that weekend was a sheet of the same thick security-grade glass that is used to top the boards around pro hockey rinks.

Peter Penkala of MVI says they had a sheet cut just a bit larger than the screen. They then used a Lidar scanner from SICK, plus several software packages (Ventuz, OptoTUIO) to get everything communicating, aligned and logging the skills action.

As a live and special events company, I’m going to assume MVI has thought about re-purposing this concept for corporate events, and certainly a hockey net could be a football/soccer net or all kinds of different sports.