Inside the arena of the future: The Barclays Center.

The Barclays Center sports venue opens in Brooklyn later this week – a new home for the relocated NBA Nets and piles of concerts. The building itself looks very different than most big arenas rising these days, and seems more in line with the new generation of soccer stadiums opening in different countries. One of the signature elements is a canopy in a loose oval (there will be a better geometric name for that, but beats me) with what looks like a very tight 6 mm pixel pitch LED board lining its inside. The thing is known as the Oculus, which is basically an architectural term for Rain Hole. Oculus sounds much better, though. Very different, and really nice. The images I have seen seem to show around the top rim information on New York/Brooklyn subway and rail lines, as while the building is on the other side of the river from Manhattan, it is apparently accessible by multiple lines. I’d love to read the strategy behind this, and wonder if the inner wall design is a counter to any zoning issues around light from the board flooding windows in surrounding residential blocks, or affecting traffic. Inside, there are 700 HD screens and another 100 digital menu boards, all running off the Cisco StadiumVision platform. Cisco, being Cisco, has missed the basics and not made any visuals available. Knuckleheads. It looks like Daktronics got the LED board work, and there is 8,000 square metres of it.