The tech entrepreneur behind converting Wall Street to a digital system has developed the “world’s smartest arena” at Golden 1 Center, according to Sacramento Kings officials.
Kings owner Vivek Ranadivé drove a project that features automated turnstiles, climate-controlled seats, the NBA’s first 4K video board and a security robot roaming the main concourse.
Each of the self-serve turnstiles, produced by Skidata, push people through the gates at a rate of 1,000 per hour. Handheld scanners, by comparison, process 300 people an hour, said Ryan Montoya, the Kings’ chief technology officer.
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ABOVE: A screen at Mission Control, where arena operations are run. BELOW: Skidata’s self-serve turnstiles.
Photos by: DON MURET / STAFF
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The Kings installed the turnstiles, in use at some European soccer stadiums, after testing them last season at Sleep Train Arena, their old home. Golden 1 Center is the first North American venue to use the product, Montoya said.
The units rapidly scan all forms of ticketing, whether it’s traditional bar codes and QR codes, as well as radio frequency identification and Apple Watch technology.
For two Paul McCartney concerts, the arena’s first two events, 10,000 patrons passed through the arena’s 24 turnstiles in one hour. Ticketmaster, the Kings’ ticketing provider, told the team it was unprecedented to have such a large volume of people entering the building in that amount of time.
Once people are in the arena, their
smartphones become the remote control for the arena, Ranadivé said.
The team’s mobile application includes artificial intelligence that allows fans to text questions to a computer in real time about their game-day experience. The more fans use the “chatbot” function, the smarter it gets, Montoya said.
“We flipped the notion of what it means to be an arena,” Ranadivé said. “Rather than you checking into the arena, the arena should check into you. It tells you how to get there, where to park, how to find your seat, how to order food and how to change the temperature in your seat.”
The brains behind the whole operation sit in two rooms at event level, Mission Control and the data center next door. On its own, the data center contains two massive 100-gigabyte “pipes” with enough power to support the infrastructure for a city of 17,000 people, Montoya said.
The technology fueled through those two pipes is distributed over 1,000 miles of cable to more than 3,000 devices in the arena, tied to wireless access points, point-of-sale terminals and the sound system.
Separately, wideband multimode fiber technology provides the backbone responsible for the lightning-fast connections within the data center, Montoya said.
The arena’s Wi-Fi system has 800-plus access points installed under seats, and which are attached to beacons with location-based technology that communicates with fans’ mobile devices. The system carries the potential to upload more than 500,000 Snapchat posts a second and 250 Instagram posts a second, Montoya said.
Mission Control, meanwhile, consolidates all aspects of arena operations into one room, covering guest services, parking, traffic, ticketing, food service, social media, police, emergency medical services, security, video cameras, city services and telecommunications.
In other markets, sports venues separate those services into multiple rooms, Montoya said, but Mission Control enables officials to react much quicker to resolve issues in real time, such as the rowdy behavior at the Jimmy Buffett concert Oct. 20 that led to an early shutdown of alcohol sales.
“Vivek came up with the concept of the information bus … what it boils down to in real time is a comprehensive, event processing engine,” Montoya said. “We base everything in the arena when it comes to technology on this bus.”
