This dome, entirely covered with LEDs, also creates an “immersive” experience for spectators. It was inaugurated on Friday by the Irish group U2.
Las Vegas remains the temple of excess. The American gaming capital, located in the Nevada desert, now has a new performance hall with a futuristic look: The Sphere, whose building is visible for kilometers thanks to the gigantic screen with which it is covered. The arena welcomed the Irish group U2 for its very first concert, from which the spectators left captivated, Friday September 29. To attract crowds, the designers of The Sphere have focused everything on immersion, without necessarily worrying about energy consumption.
1Its outdoor screen has a surface area of more than seven football fields
Expected to open in 2021, The Sphere experienced delays due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Its 53,000 m2 outdoor screen (approximately the size of 7.5 football fields) was only put into service on July 4, the American National Day. It is the largest LED screen in the world, and it is “fully programmable” argues the Canadian company Saco, which designed it.
During this great premiere, The Sphere displayed a globe, a basketball or even… a giant eye, which surprised the Las Vegas audience. To achieve this result, the designers of the giant screen installed no less than 1.2 million small LED pucks on the structure, spaced 20 centimeters from each other. Each puck contains 48 LED diodes, “capable of displaying 256 million colors each”, explains the Saco group.
2 Inside, a 15,000 square meter screen
On Friday, fans of the group U2 experienced an extraordinary concert, thanks to the giant, spherical screen covering a large part of the ceiling of the arena. According to the local newspaper Las Vegas Review Journalit has an area of approximately 15,000 m2, with a resolution of 16K, i.e. “the most precise LED screen in the world”.
The result amazed spectators, who published images of the concert and the decor on social networks. To appreciate these larger-than-life visual effects, you still had to pay at least 370 euros. Ultimately, the owners of the room plan to broadcast sports matches and films specially designed for this gigantic screen.
3Nearly 200,000 almost invisible speakers
To make the show even more immersive, 10,000 of The Sphere’s 18,600 seats are equipped with haptic feedback, that is to say vibrating systems.
Enough to accompany the approximately 170,000 speakers with which the room is full, as detailed in Las Vegas Review Journal. A sound system which is nevertheless very discreet, because it is almost exclusively hidden behind LED panels which have the particularity of being “acoustically transparent” – understand which do not obstruct the diffusion of sound.
4More than 95,000 MWh consumed per year
Unsurprisingly, The Sphere is an energy sinkhole. According to a memo written by the S&P Global firm in 2019, the designers of this room warned the Nevada authorities that their systems would need a maximum power of 20 MW, and that everything would have to consume “approximately 95,779 MWh per year”. Which approximately represents the annual consumption of 20,500 French households, the equivalent of a city like Valenciennes (North).
To reduce their environmental footprint, the owners of the venue say they want to source 70% of their electricity from solar energy, according to USA Today. But this is a simple long-term objective, signed as part of a 25-year contract with the electricity supplier NV Energy.
5The arena cost $2.3 billion in total
The budget for building The Sphere is just as disproportionate as the room. In total, according to Bloomberg, no less than 2.3 billion dollars (around 2.2 billion euros) were spent to make this crazy project a reality. The man behind The Sphere is none other than James Dolan, promoter and operator of the huge venue at Madison Square Garden in New York.
In addition to concerts, shows and other sports broadcasts, the huge screens of The Sphere should also very soon broadcast an even more profitable type of content: advertisements. This oversized insert is indeed “visible from the Las Vegas Strip, hundreds of hotel rooms, the monorail, and even the sky”argue its owners on their site. Enough to gradually absorb the colossal costs of its construction and the electricity bill.