Although Tony Gonzalez has a pretty good history of lighting up the field, there is a company out of Ontario Canada that has been working on giving that statement a whole new meaning. Mark Nicholls, president and chief executive officer of Sportexe, talks about his company’s new technolgy in a report written by reportonbusiness.com saying:

Though it’s still more than a year away from commercialization, Sportexe has patented a technology that will effectively turn entire sports fields into giant computer screens.

With the new turf, (using fiber optic technology) the labor-intensive process of converting a football field into a soccer field could be done in seconds using a computer.

Empty spaces, such as end zones and sidelines, could provide new revenue streams in the form of advertising dollars as unused playing surfaces became interactive billboards.

“It’s taken us five years to get to the point where we could even start talking about it,” Mr. Nicholls says, but at its core, it’s a simple concept.

An image — a first-down marker, foul-ball line, beer logo, whatever — is electronically sent to field level, where it’s distributed through a network of thousands of interconnected trays that convey light.

Think of it as a grid of fibres that work together to form a sort of rudimentary television screen. But rather than being upright, it’s lying on its back, underground. From there, the image is reflected up through thousands of tiny optical fibres blended with polyethylene made to resemble grass.

More than that they say these fields can be smarter than the human eye, yes you read it right, a football field can be smarter than a human. By detecting where the light is not being shown, aka a foot covering the optic cables, the field can determine whether that reception by Gonzalez in the endzone actually had one or both feet down before going out of bounds.

I can just imagine it now, Larry Johnson runs it in for a touchdown and the entire field lights up to show his latest music video with Jay-Z in celebration.

The rock is in the building!!

[photo via - Chiefs]