Who Knew Basketball Wanted an Interactive LED Flooring?

ASB grew to become a pacesetter in squash court docket manufacturing and maintained this place for many years, together with a mid-2000s introduction of a brand new glass-based floor and glass enclosure setup that’s turn out to be the usual for squash competitions worldwide.

Christof joined the corporate to succeed his father as CEO in 2012, and ASB started specializing in LED surfaces. The primary such product was a easy ground show referred to as “ASB Multisports” that might change between markings for numerous hardcourt sports activities like basketball, volleyball, and handball. By 2015 the corporate had additionally developed “ASB Lumiflex,” the fuller LED show court docket I dribbled throughout in Orlando.

The corporate shifted focus to gaining official approval from FIBA, the world’s governing basketball physique, through the Covid-19 pandemic, and it succeeded in 2022 when FIBA modified the foundations for official allowable taking part in surfaces to incorporate glass along with conventional wooden. ASB’s first official FIBA occasion was the under-19 Girls’s World Cup in 2023.

Latest consumer installations embrace European basketball groups Bayern Munich and Panathinaikos, each of which have performed all their dwelling video games through the 2024-25 season on ASB courts; NBA All-Star Weekend 2024 in Indiana, which utilized ASB for a number of occasions together with the dunk and three-point contests; the College of Kentucky’s “Big Blue Madness” occasion in 2024; plus a number of different professional and collegiate groups or amenities throughout a number of sports activities.

Industrial and fan engagement alternatives abound with this know-how, which opens the court docket up as a large clean canvas. A few of the time, the floor seems similar to a conventional parquet taking part in floor, with reasonable photos of wooden panels. All of the sudden, although, it could actually rework into one thing else.

When free throws are shot throughout a basketball sport, as an example, most gamers are inclined to spend 45 to 60 seconds standing on one facet of the court docket. ASB purchasers can use the accessible area on the opposite facet of the ground to, say, present a graphic on the shooter’s free-throw proportion—with an accompanying model companion’s brand proper alongside it.

“This surface has allowed us to completely reimagine how we connect with fans and how we deliver value to our commercial partners,” Thanos Bichtas, head of promoting for Panathinaikos, tells me in an e mail. “Whether it’s dynamic intros with custom court animations, or live visual effects that react to big plays, we’re now offering a level of visual storytelling that transforms the arena into an interactive experience.

Bichtas says the court has become a high-impact platform for brand visibility. “And crucially, it doesn’t disrupt the fan experience; it enhances it.”

Infinity League, an indoor soccer league with groups from Germany and Italy, makes use of the glass floor to juice up the motion. Picture courtesy of ASB GlassFloor

Flooring Workouts

On my go to, I used to be proven a collection of kid-friendly actions that might flip these courts into academic hubs throughout college hours, from numerous scale renderings of dinosaurs and sea creatures to a function that lets children design mazes to run by means of. Bichtas says Panathinaikos has already used its ASB court docket to host various occasions, from model activations to basketball ability clinics for followers—youthful ones particularly. Christof, a Go-Kart fanatic, envisions a complete racetrack setup on one in all ASB’s courts within the close to future.

“If you look at an arena’s infrastructure, it costs somewhere around 250 to 350 million Euros,” Babinsky says. “If you put our floor in there, that’s just about 1 percent more of the overall budget. But having that floor in there will allow the arena to be used much more often, because suddenly you don’t have an arena used for a home game every two weeks. No, you can have kids in there Monday morning.”