Scanning the Rogers Centre for the Blue Jays’ New Jumbotron

Overview

Ahead of the 2022 season, as part of the Rogers Centre’s multi-year renovation, the Toronto Blue Jays replaced the original centre-field jumbotron with a video board roughly 110 ft wide by 49 ft high — close to 4,900 sq ft of LED where the old board had about 3,500 (Ballpark Digest has the public details). The new screen had to fill every inch between the hotel windows and the 1989 structure, and the drawings for that structure were never meant to support a fit that tight.

We worked directly with the display’s engineering and installation team. Their question was simple: what is actually there? The parapet, the steel behind it, the cavity inside the sign structure where the new LED modules would hang — none of it could be taken from the original drawings. So we measured it. Over 350 scan positions, a registered point cloud of the whole bowl, and a set of as-built drawings the installers could engineer and fabricate against.

This is the same problem every scoreboard, video board or signage installation in an older venue runs into, so here is what we scanned, what we delivered, and where the data pushed back.

Project stages

1. Scope and control with the engineering team: define the capture zone and set survey control so every scan ties to one coordinate system
2. Terrestrial laser scanning of the field, bleachers, VIP booths, the parapet and inside the sign structure with FARO scanners — 350+ positions
3. Registration and QA in FARO SCENE, with the cloud shared through SCENE 2go so the team could look at the real geometry instead of a drawing of it
4. Scan-to-BIM: Revit model of the existing structure at the mounting interfaces
5. Scan-to-CAD: AutoCAD section cuts and clearances for fabrication and installation planning
6. Coordination: drawings walked through on site with the contractors and the Canadian and US engineering firms

Challenge 1: no usable as-builts for a 1989 stadium

The original drawings could not be trusted for the clearances between the new screen, the concrete, the parapet and the supporting steel. Everything the installation depended on had to be measured, not assumed.

Solution

We scanned the full installation zone plus the surrounding areas the engineers needed for context — including inside the sign structure itself — and delivered the point cloud alongside the Revit model, so any clearance could be checked against measured geometry. The section cuts came out of that cloud; the drawing above is one of them.

Challenge 2: holding 2–4 mm across a stadium bowl

The screen is big, the distances are long, and the mounting interface is a narrow strip of steel and concrete a long way from anywhere you can stand a tripod. On top of that, the stadium lights were far brighter than the surfaces around them, there is a lot of glass at that end of the building, and the renovation was already under way, so there was debris in the zone. Reflections and over-contrast gave us small deviations in a few spots, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Solution

Dense, overlapping setups — that is where the 350+ positions come from — tied to survey control, then registration checked against the control network before anything left the office. Where the lighting produced noise we re-scanned or cleaned the area rather than model through it. The deliverables at the parapet and mounting planes came in at 2–4 mm, which is what the fabrication needed.

Challenge 3: a live venue, COVID, and two countries of engineers

The building stayed in use, the capture happened under pandemic site rules with a small crew, and the installation involved Canadian and American engineering firms with different software and drawing conventions.

Solution

We scheduled capture around the venue programme and issued the deliverables in the formats each firm already used: the Revit model for coordination, DWG sections for fabrication, and the point cloud for anyone who wanted to verify a dimension themselves. One measured source, no arguing about whose drawing was right.

Outcome

• The new board was engineered and fabricated against measured geometry, not the 1989 drawings
• Clearances between the parapet, the sign cavity and the LED planes were resolved in the model before steel was cut
• One model and one drawing set served both the Canadian and US engineering teams
• The client got what they needed for the installation — and the dataset is still there for the next round of work on the parapet or the board

Tools on this project

FARO terrestrial scanners · FARO SCENE for registration · SCENE 2go for sharing the point cloud · Autodesk Revit for the model · AutoCAD for the section cuts and 2D deliverables.

On site

Planning a video board, scoreboard or signage installation in an existing venue? See our Scan-to-BIM services or 3D laser scanning in Toronto, and ask us for the Rogers Centre section drawings as a sample of what the installers received.