Rugby Signage

I was flipping through the channels one rainy Sunday a while back and came across a rugby match from Australia. Since I hadn’t watched rugby in like… years (and since there wasn’t anything else on), I decided to watch for a bit.

I don’t remember much about the actual match, but I do remember being blown away by the ads on the field. It looked like they were made using the same technology TV networks use in American football broadcasts to “paint” the first-down line on the field… which is amazingly complex, by the way. Only this was some kind of super high-tech version, able to do all kinds of designs:

jp-morgan
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Come to find out, it’s not high-tech at all. It’s just paint on a field, applied in such a manner so that from the camera’s point of view it looks like it’s “floating” on the grass. Here are a few pics from other angles so you can see how odd the graphics look away from the TV cameras:

Newlands Rugby
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Rugby
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Rugby 2
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Apparently this type of “grass signage” is a big deal in Australia (see this company or this company). Although it’s not as high-tech as I’d thought, it’s still pretty clever.

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