Last night Sony Computer Entertainment Canada and the Rogers Centre (formerly the SkyDome), home of the Toronto Blue Jays, held an experiment to answer a question many a fan has pondered – What would it be like to hook up a PlayStation 2 video game system to the Jay’s Vision stadium screen? Would the reality match the fantasy? Both camps agreed on a night to try it out and invited a select gathering of the press to witness the results. I was fortunate enough to be one of them.

At 807 inches, the Jay’s Vision screen is considered to be the largest in Canada. It is made up of 432 lines of LED lights and has a power consumption of one Megawatt. It’s a mere one-and-a-half inches thick and can be broken apart into smaller panels for repair. These are the exact same kind of panels used to create the other screens and displays mounted throughout the stadium.

According to the Rogers Centre staff, the screen has never been hit by a ball. Sitting too high above the home run fence, a professional baseball player would have to hit the ball over 550 feet to reach the screen and so far no one’s done it.

Once the Blue Jays and the Cleveland Indians finished playing, and the stadium was emptied, and the clean-up crew appeared to rake the dirt mounds and clean the field, Sony and Rogers Centre staff descended onto the field where they placed two of the “TD Comfort Chairs” behind second plate and much to my surprise dropped the PlayStation 2 right in front of them.

I had half-expected that they were going to have to hook the PlayStation 2 up from inside the control room in the stadium tower, but they had actually found a long enough of a cable to run from Second Base all the way over the field, off into the dug-out and up into the control room.

Sitting in the high-backed, plush green chairs, all the PlayStation crew had to do was lean forward, power on their slim PS2 and load in a game disc. They brought three games – MLB 06, Madden NFL 07, and Burnout: Revenge (because you can’t test out a screen of that size properly without some adrenaline visuals).

Much to everyone’s delight the system looked great on the big screen and while the PlayStation crew took turns competing against the Rogers Centre staff on MLB 06, I chatted with the stadium engineers about their set-up.

The Jay’s Vision screen normally has a resolution of 432 x 1440, but because the PS2 doesn’t support such a wide screen, the engineers had to divide off the sides of the display into separate panels and fill them with PlayStation logos. The remaining middle section that was used for the video game itself has a resolution of 432 x 768.

This wasn’t the first time that the Rogers Centre had played around with the big screen. Each year the Blue Jays hold a special sleepover event where families are invited to come and watch a movie. They’re encouraged to bring tents and sleeping bags and the stadium staff turn the lights down low and I’m told the movie on the jumbo screen, in the big darkness, looks incredible. They open the dome so that you can see the stars and after the movie is over everyone falls asleep, right there on the field. In the morning they can open the dome and let the sun in to wake everyone up.

Sony wouldn’t quite confirm that the night’s experiment was a test to see if it might be worth arranging a bigger event later on around the launch of the PlayStation 3. Everyone asked why they didn’t bring a PlayStation 3 and the answer apparently is that there are only two working PlayStation 3 prototypes in North America right now, neither expendable enough for this little distraction.

The thought of trying out the PlayStation 3 later on, with or without Sony, did get the gears going in the minds of the stadium engineers. They mentioned to me that they had figured out a way to do multiple systems for multiplayer games.

On either side of the Jay’s Vision screen are two smaller, LED displays mounted into the fence board at the outfield. It would be no problem to connect those displays up to game consoles for a six screen session. You could have two players sitting and playing off of the Jay’s Vision screen behind second base, and then have two sets of two players playing off of the outfield fence displays for a total of six players, all connected and playing against each other.

I think I’d like to try that.

After the Sony and Rogers Centre gang finished their competition, they were kind enough to let me jump into a green chair and give it a try. In short, it’s awesome. Although extremely large in size, the stadium screen had no problems displaying the game at full speed. A moving image is of course made up of thousands of still ones and sometimes with a screen that uses LCD or LED technology, it can’t display all of the still pictures in the sequence and so the result can be a choppy, slow, or skipping performance. Not the case, in that sense it was just like playing on a home television. The detail and colour palette was also just as good, although because of the wash-out effect on Burnout it wasn’t always easy to make out the details on the road, but on the other games the details were all there.

It also helped having two of the in-field stadium speakers connected up.

Burnout: Revenge is a racing game where you drive along a busy highway. The twist is that you’re driving into oncoming traffic and you have to do your best to avoid the cars coming at you. It’s inevitable that you’re going to crash and because you and the other cars are meeting each other head-on, the crashes are spectacular, rendered in slow-motion, with thousands of little details of pieces of shattered glass and crushed metal flying about.

In the middle of a stadium, with two speakers resounding out the deafening sounds of the collisions as the cars explode in over-the-top displays on the big screen, well, it’s a big experience that I loved.

eTalk Daily producer Cameron Cale and myself battled it out on MLB 06, Sony’s own baseball game. Since we did not have a lot of time, we tried out a mini-game included on the disc called King of the Diamond where you each take turns trying to hit a succession of Home Runs before getting a number of “outs”. I’ll let you decide who won, the early morning tech geek or the red carpet celebrity schmoozer.

What I will say is that I now know what it’s like to hit a Home Run at the Blue Jays’ stadium. Sure, it was in a video game, but it was also in the stadium and the crowd did go wild.