Who Knew Basketball Wanted an Interactive LED Flooring?

ASB turned a frontrunner 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 would swap between markings for varied 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, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, and it succeeded in 2022 when FIBA modified the foundations for official allowable enjoying surfaces to incorporate glass along with conventional wooden. ASB’s first official FIBA occasion was the under-19 Ladies’s World Cup in 2023.

Latest shopper installations embody European basketball groups Bayern Munich and Panathinaikos, each of which have performed all their house video games throughout 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 “Massive Blue Insanity” occasion in 2024; plus a number of different professional and collegiate groups or services throughout a number of sports activities.

Industrial and fan engagement alternatives abound with this expertise, which opens the court docket up as a large clean canvas. A few of the time, the floor seems similar to a conventional parquet enjoying floor, with real looking pictures of wooden panels. Immediately, although, it might remodel into one thing else.

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

“This floor has allowed us to fully reimagine how we join with followers and the way we ship worth to our business companions,” Thanos Bichtas, head of selling for Panathinaikos, tells me in an e mail. “Whether or not it’s dynamic intros with customized court docket animations, or dwell visible results that react to massive performs, we’re now providing a degree of visible storytelling that transforms the world into an interactive expertise.

Bichtas says the court docket has turn out to be a high-impact platform for model visibility. “And crucially, it doesn’t disrupt the fan expertise; 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. Photograph courtesy of ASB GlassFloor

Flooring Workout routines

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

“In case you take a look at an area’s infrastructure, it prices someplace round 250 to 350 million Euros,” Babinsky says. “In case you put our ground in there, that’s nearly 1 % extra of the general price range. However having that ground in there’ll enable the world for use rather more typically, as a result of all of the sudden you don’t have an area used for a house sport each two weeks. No, you possibly can have youngsters in there Monday morning.”