Las Vegas’ latest flagship concert venue, a $2.3 billion gigantic sphere, played host to U2 in its first outing on September 29, and social media was quickly ablaze with clips from the event – especially from inside the sphere.
Inside the 112-meter-tall and 157-meter-wide space is a high-resolution LED screen that wraps halfway around the auditorium, with an even larger display encircling its exterior. At 54,000 square meters, this makes it the largest display on earth, and absolutely incomparable to the best displays you might buy for your home.
The Sphere at the Venetian is one of the most hi-tech venues in the world and serves its up-to 18,600-strong audience with high speed Wi-Fi and haptic technology fitted into each seat. This comes alongside spatial audio system based on the X1 speaker module by Holoplot, with 1,600 placed across the venue using beamforming and wave field synthesis to create dazzling 4D effects.
The largest LED display on the planet
But its interior 16K display, made by SACO Technologies – a specialist in LED video displays and lighting – was the real star. The interior display measures 15,000 square-meters and has 1.2 million light modules each divided into 48 LED diodes. Each one is capable of displaying 256 million different colours.
Alongside its newfound prominence as a concert venue, the Sphere is also in use in virtual production and postproduction settings thanks to the Sphere Studios venture.
The company collaborates with filmmakers and other artists to create content for the Las Vegas sphere – including many of the visuals that have been dazzling – and terrifying – many across Las Vegas.
On one end of the spectrum, we’ve seen fantastical visualisations of the Earth, the moon and Mars, among other visualizations as compiled by BBC News. This has also descended into rather more disturbing territory, however, with a gigantic eyeball, for example, spotted on show. This was described by one nearby driver as “messed up”, according to social media clips.