At the very least FIRST put a larger image up. The size changed from 600 x 449 to 800 x 600 pixels. With this change more details are showing up in the image.
I have noticed that the diamond plate disc is reflecting red and blue light.
I think Joe DiMaggio, or “the Yankee Clipper”, was number five for the Yankees. But what does that have to do with anything?
All I have to say is “Speed Racer”???
So maby the game has to deal a lot with speedness in the game?
I think a more likely guess in that vane of thinking would be third base.
Have they came out with the list of what etquitment we need to build the feild.
they usually release that information the week of kickoff
Hi,
Our team thinks we have an idea:
The five looks like it is from POOL ball.
The backround looks like water: Maybe a POOL as a clue for POOL balls?
Anyway, just an idea. 
The past few years, the parts list came out the thursday before kickoff, so in effect: maybe tomorrow.
[EDIT]
**Bill of Materials
**This season, each team’s decision regarding building field mockups may be a bit more complex than normal. The Game Design Committee feels
that an advance Bill of Materials (BOM) list might be misleading and cause some teams to buy more materials than they will likely use.
Please wait for a full set of field drawings and their lower cost equivalents to be released immediately following Kickoff. Knowing the nature of this year’s challenge, you can more logically decide what to buy and build.
See you at Kickoff!
[/EDIT]
If I had a better rendering software… and a premade crowd for refraction purposes, I could duplicate the picture exactly… but… this will have to do with just Solidworks and default textures.
My final guess. :]
Thanks for posting the original image. I used the Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit, located at http://diit.sourceforge.net/index.html. When comparing both smaller images, I found them to be identical. I have a little too much time on my hands… so I decided to keep experimenting…
I wanted to see what kind of difference encrypting “AIM HIGH” in the picture would make.
When I did this I had these results:
Results of benchmark tests
Average Absolute Difference: 4.6866898009652585E-4
Mean Squared Error: 6.082725060827251E-4
LpNorm: 3.0413625304136254E-4
Laplacian Mean Squared Error: 4.206612200901864E-6
Signal to Noise Ratio: 1.3982824224590164E8
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 5.85936396E8
Normalised Cross-Correlation: 0.9999989969072935
Correlation Quality: 126.60633961495463
This shows that the software is capable of finding very small changes in the image… and I decided to make one more attempt. I took the new high quality image, and resized it to match the one they released earlier, as the program requires the images to be the same size. Upon comparison, I had there results:
Results of benchmark tests
Average Absolute Difference: 15.601511706752822
Mean Squared Error: 756.6327031231303
LpNorm: 378.31635156156517
Laplacian Mean Squared Error: 2.111745474975075
Signal to Noise Ratio: 112.4107839655667
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 471.0462533919842
Normalised Cross-Correlation: 0.9982814866037124
Correlation Quality: 126.38889170404684
If you look at the Average Absolute Difference, this, along with most of the other values, is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE greater than my “AIM HIGH” test. Now, I can’t guarantee that my method of resizing the large image would match the method the GDC did, which would cause these differences. Also, if they chose to make ‘minor adjustments’ to the actual content of the image, that would create this kind of difference in the photo. I think that differences seen here are very high for a simple text message - it would have to be over 1000 characters long.
Regardless, I can tell you that small image and the large image are subtley different. Whether there was some touch-up going on, or if there is a message hidden in the background, I am unable to tell, but they are clearly different at some level.
Based on the way FIRST has treated the hint in the past, this image seems pretty different. My conscience still tells me that the 5 has something either to do with sports or entertainment.
There must be a variety of levels, or platforms, and like Johnny 5, there will be some mini-projectile involved. I was told by my teacher that something related to basketball may even be put in for this. Tubes may connect these platforms, and contain some substance which revolves around the field in those tubes, activating some switch in the current platforms it goes through.
Oh my oh my oh my…
What am i supposed to be thinking NOW?!
Ok…
So that sure goes along with the **water\fire balls shooting\volcano eruption on middle of the arena\Whatever **theories that have been posted here, but lets get real…
I think that it means that there will be something heavy in the field, like a big platform of metal in the middle or something…
Maybe, it could mean that the fiels is a sort of RANDOM, meaning that there is some sort of spread, like someone mentioned before about bottles of H2O, though its not complicated if its random, as last year’s arena was rantom too in a sort of way, the balls HAVE laid in random places, so its quiet the same…
And therefore, i think that the arena is going to be very complicated, and we are gonna need the whole arena to exersice our bot well, unlike last year when all we needed was to hang a Hoolah-Hoop to the window and nail the green light above it…
Oh boy Oh boy Oh boy…
3 and a half days to KickOff and i have already finished our website, what am i gonna do now in order to not stare at the clue 24/7 ?
ok in the enlarged version of the game hint located on the decrypted file ther eis definitely a banana in the background. even the stem is shown.
current speculations believe we will be climbing a diamond plate aluminum tree and picking bananas.
I can’t help but see the ring around the diamond plate circle, and realize that it looks like the red/blue rings around the goal openings last year…
Here’s what my sisters says (knows about FIRST, but only as that “thing her brother does”, and hasn’t ever been to a competition):
- it looks like a man hole cover
- shooting… are you going to be shooting something?
- does it involve water?
- time: 50 seconds.
- tunnels/mazes
- a ramp? I always see ramps with that pattern on it (referring to the diamond plate)
- a course: ramps, corners, etc – lots to do.
She pretty muched summed this whole thread up in about 5 seconds.
OOOOOOOOOO 5!!!
this is the fifth year of them following the usfirst logo! this means cubez! eureka! hmm… well there is a theory on the 5.
Elgin’s post earlier in this thread [on the previous page, but if I don’t link it you can’t see the picture attached]…I looked at the picture…
doesn’t it kind of look like a jello mold? hmmmmm…
just adding to some of the absurd ideas…
hope that doesn’t drive anyone insane, I just feel like throwing in a completely wacky $0.02.
The 5 of diamonds seems to be a good little hint…Maybe playing cards with the robots or some sort of card game. Possibly Innertubes as one of our mentors said…maybe a strategy game of some sort…Ferdi also says there will be 5 platforms we will have to jump our robot from…Highly unlikely but that’s Ferdi for ya! 
- balls: tennis, dodge, kick, playground, poof, soccer, etc…
- Innertubes
- floppies
- tote boxes
- tetras
There have only really been five unique game pieces. Are they all going to be present this year?
Nah… no… no way?
nO?
Nah…
He may be on to something with his idea of the five unique objects used in passed events reapearing in this years event. each object could be on a platform that total up to five in all.
That is because diamond plate is easy to grip…