Color of one of the goal post: Cyan instead of Blue

Hi everyone!
I discussed years ago around a suggestion about the color of one goal post.
The question: what about change the color of one of the goal post: Cyan instead of Blue?
In my opinion Cyan is easier to recognize in not well lit environments (happened many times during the competition that I participated). Some kind of “blue” are really dark, near black, if the playing area is not well illuminated.
Your opinions?

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What do people think we should do with the blue goal color?

  • Keep it blue
  • Make it Cyan
  • Don’t care, both will be fine
  • Something else (please post below)

0 voters

Hi,
you are pretty much describing the exact reason for it being just blue.
We just can’t control the exact shade that is being used across different tournaments and especially countries. That is why it just states ‘blue’, expecting teams to be able to cope with all sorts of ‘blue’.

The question is if we specified “should be cyan but teams must be prepared to play with whatever tournament organizers provide”, would that on balance improve gameplay?

Cyan is not a shade of blue, they are two different colors.
The advantage to use cyan instead of blue is that fundamentally cameras can recognize cyan easily while in poor lit fields condition a dark blue with a black wall background is practically indistinguishable (with the cameras I used - some teams maybe solved that problem).

My experiences: many times we had no problems with yellow goal but many with dark blue matte color because poor lit playgrounds. We ask to illuminate better the fields but the organizer cannot solve the problem. Result: we can make statistically around 50% of goals while teams do not using a camera for searching/analyzing the goals had no problems. I mean that using a camera results in a big risk because you do not know how illuminated is the field. Maybe some team solved it using the “right” camera after testing a number of different models. I think that must be indicated in the rules that the table field had a minimum and maximum lighting (candelas/square meter)? As in ping-pong tournaments. Too complicate?

Moreover, changing the colors of the goals depending on the tournament organizers may result in a more confused situation?

In maze entry rules the color of the victims is red traffic RAL 3020. If we apply that idea (RAL standard) maybe we can solve partially the problem to recognise the goals, especially using “light” colors tones. Of course is not that easy due to distances robot-goals and metamerism that cannot be an issue in maze entry.

Best regards.

That is not going to be practical for cost reasons (esp. for small local qualification tournaments).

The problem is that the same material is almost never available across regions. Therefore there will always be some variability because manufacturing fields centrally and distributing them around the world is way too expensive.

That is an interesting idea - though even we specify that we cannot expect that to create uniform conditions it might at least narrow the distribution down a little bit.

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Thank you for your clarification.

@PeterParker What RAL color do you have in mind? We’d like it to be as close to RGB #00FFFF as possible but the RAL colors I found were all darker than that. Ultimately we can strongly suggest that but we can’t put as a hard requirement because “we now can’t have a valid tournament because the color is slightly different” is not something we can let happen.

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I agree with you. Unfortunately there is not a pure Yellow or Cyan in RAL system but similar colors quite light.
We used RAL 5012 for the “blue” goal and RAL 1016 for yellow goal.
We painted that using a matte paint on wood.

RAL 5012 Lichtblau (RAL Classic) | RALfarbpalette.de

RAL 1016 Schwefelgelb (RAL Classic) | RALfarbpalette.de

Maybe a better solution is to use pure Pantone colors yellow and cyan matte version. I discovered there are spray can cheap and easy to use.

Cheers.