The Intuit Dome, the $2 billion Inglewood, California, venue that will host the Clippers starting next season, opens August 15. Fourteen-time Grammy Award-winner Bruno Mars will christen the dome with back-to-back shows, followed by Olivia Rodrigo. Usher will play the venue in September before the Clippers move in when the NBA season begins in October. 

In team owner Steve Ballmer’s “basketball mecca,” the Halo Board will be the center of the fan experience, taking a backseat only to what happens on the court. The double-sided, continuous wraparound 4K LED screen is a staggering 44,000 square feet. It has 38,375 square feet of screen canvas (equal to more than 3,592 60-inch televisions) with over 233 million LEDs.

‘This is not an object’

Whatever you do, don’t call it a scoreboard—at least within earshot of Ballmer.

His vision is that the Intuit Dome will create the “ultimate basketball experience,” with the Halo Board at its heart. From the outset, designers aimed to create a board that both educates and entertains fans. Spanning nearly an acre, the board has plenty of real estate. The challenge was, how to best use it.

Gillian Zucker is the former president of business operations for the Clippers but was promoted in March to become CEO of Halo Sports and Entertainment, the new entity Ballmer created to oversee the Clippers, its G-League affiliate, the Ontario Clippers, the Intuit Dome, and the Kia Forum. Zucker recalls Ballmer starting every Halo Board meeting saying, “Remember, this is not an object.” You may marvel at an object the first time you see it, but the novelty fades. The Halo Board is a dynamic experience. And a dynamic experience continues to amaze, whether it’s your first or 400th time.

Hovering over the court

At first glance, the board is jaw-dropping. It hovers angelically above the court, the inside ring visible from the lower bowl and the outside from the upper seats. During games, it will display live game feeds, scores, and advanced stats that tell the story behind what’s happening on the court.

“For the hardcore fan,” Ballmer said, “we can light up more basketball-related things. We can show play flow so people really know what we’re running. We can light up statistics in new ways. We can show more replay angles simultaneously when a call is going to be disputed or a timeout is taken. It gives us the ability to engage the true basketball enthusiasts.”

The board also features fan engagement spaces with interactive games, social media feeds, and fan prompts. By popular demand, it will also include a “Steve Cam”—a live feed of Ballmer, the team’s owner and No. 1 fan, from his floor seat.

“We can play games, we can have more fun, we can show more fans,” Ballmer said. “People love seeing themselves up on the big board. Whether you’re a more dedicated, deep fan or a little less so, we have the ability to give you a different kind of experience.”

‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…’

“We’ve learned,” Zucker said, “that whenever we’re in a conversation, a meeting—anything with [Ballmer]—and he says, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…’ our ears perk up and we all pay attention, because something interesting is coming.”

The gamification of the Halo Board was borne out of one such meeting.

The Intuit Dome is outfitted with power in every seat so fans can charge their phones. But in Ballmer’s What else would you do with it? spirit, they added four-button game controllers and eye-safe LED laser pointers to each armrest. These tools let fans engage in live Halo Board competitions like predictive guessing games, trivia, and other challenges. As fans get eliminated, their LED lights go dark, and the last fan with their light still shining wins, so the whole arena knows who they are.

Halo Dome tech partners

The Clippers partnered with South Dakota-based video display company Daktronics to build the Halo Board. But after interviewing several of the “usual suspects” to maximize the board’s digital capabilities, Zucker was underwhelmed, so she hired Spinifex Group—a digital creative studio known for theme park rides and interactive art—to craft immersive fan experiences. Their fresh perspective on sports venues made them ideal innovation partners.

Spinifex mapped every seat and pixel, ensuring that every fan had a comprehensive view of the board. The smallest letter stands two feet tall, readable from any seat. Leveraging 4K resolution, they created what Zucker calls the most realistic motion graphics she’s ever seen.

“The resolution is incredible,” she said. “They told us that one of the hardest things that you can do is try to digitally recreate the movement of water. So, because we don’t like to do anything the easy way, that’s exactly what we asked them to do. And what they’ve come up with is pretty amazing. They really understood the challenge of the assignment.”

In many arenas, at crucial times in the game when the home team could use a little home-court advantage, the scoreboard will feature a “noise meter” graphic, letting fans know it’s time to get loud. This prompted another Ballmer challenge: “Wouldn’t it be cool if the noise meter was real?”

“We started scouring the globe,” Zucker said, “trying to find out some way that we actually could identify the loudest sections in the arena and try to attach it to the Halo Board so we could gamify it.”

They found one technology that could narrow it down to the loudest 25-seat section.

Ballmer’s response: “Is that the best you can do?”

Two years later, on the cusp of the venue’s opening, the Intuit Dome is outfitted with decibel readers that can determine the single loudest seat in the arena at any given time.

Ballmer: “Wouldn’t it be cool if—because we knew which fan was cheering the loudest—we could actually reward them?”

“That was a big ‘aha’ moment for us,” Zucker said. “Just the idea that knowing the identities of the people who are in the arena could completely transform the experience.”

Personalizing the fan experience

One of the biggest challenges Zucker’s team faced while crafting the Intuit Dome’s fan experience was the fact that it’s difficult to reward fans if you don’t know who they are. “That’s a limitation we have today,” said George Hanna, the Clippers’ chief technology and digital officer. “We don’t know who most of the fans are who come into our building.”

Typically, 30 percent of ticket buyers account for 70 percent of game attendees, leaving most fans anonymous to teams and venues. The Intuit Dome changes this with a personalized ticketing system akin to airline or cruise bookings. Fans must create accounts and verify identities, even for tickets that are gifted or purchased from a third party.

The dome’s ticketing and ID system, coupled with its frictionless design, delivers this vision.

Greetings and rewards

It also personalizes the experience. First-time visitors receive special greetings, while frequent attendees can earn rewards. Fans can enable location settings for perks like early arrival bonuses. The team can even reward its most engaged fans in real-time. If you’re the loudest fan on the noise meter, the team can send a push notification to your phone with a reward for a free bottle of water so you can soothe your throat and keep cheering.

No downloads, no QR codes. The winning fan simply walks into the marketplace, grabs their reward, and walks out—completely frictionless, on the Clippers, for being the loudest fan.