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The New York Rangers are basically Big Brother

MSG CHANGES

A renovated Madison Square Garden is shown in this undated computer rendering provided to the media on Tuesday, June 2, 2009. The facelift for Cablevision Systems Corp .-owned Madison Square Garden will cost more than the original $500 million estimated when the project was announced in April 2008, vice chairman Hank Ratner said, declining to expand on the price tag. The renovation will be paid for entirely by the arena. Source: Madison Square Garden via Bloomberg News EDITOR’S NOTE: NO SALES. FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY.

Thousands of hockey fans will be in attendance tonight at the partly transformed Madison Square Garden as the New York Rangers host the Toronto Maple Leafs. The game will also feature the debut of what they’re calling the FanCam, though they might as well call it the end of civil liberties as we know it.

From the Rangers website:

What is the FanCam? This high definition image will capture Madison Square Garden in its entirety, and fans will be able to “step inside” the 360 degree gigapixel image and look around during this frozen moment of time. The resolution of 20 billion pixels is so high that fans will be able to zoom in to find themselves or their friends, “tag” themselves in the photo, and share via email, Facebook, and Twitter. Fans can even cruise around Madison Square Garden to see who else was present at the game.

By tagging yourself, you will be entered to win two tickets to a Rangers 2011-2012 home game of your choice.


So not only is Big Brother taking high-resolution photos of the MSG crowd, it’s offering Rangers fans the chance to win free tickets if they’d be so kind as to enter their personal information into its gigantic secret database.

OK, so maybe it’s not as nefarious as I’m making it out to be. They actually had something like this in downtown Vancouver during the Cup finals before – let’s call it the “unpleasantness” – that followed Game 7.

Here’s the wide angle:

Crowd

Those numbers you see are people that have tagged themselves.

Now you just zoom in on the image and...

Crowd close

There’s Dalia!

Sadly, here’s a picture of the same area that I took (as a newspaper employee, not drunken lout) on my Blackberry after Game 7.

Trouble