This is the new attraction in Las Vegas: the Sphere – 110 meters high – entirely covered with LED screens. The first images of this ball transformed into a giant eye or a basketball had already gone around the world. But there are almost as many screens inside, in the concert hall inaugurated by U2 eight days ago.
It’s a $2.3 billion ball, so big that in Paris, it would far exceed the 2nd floor of the Eiffel Tower. But it is first of all a sphere. And at the start of the project, on several points – and in particular the screens and the audio – many said: technologically, it is impossible.
First of all, the screens: they also line the interior of the sphere over 15,000 m2. You know 4K. In the sphere, it is 16K. In other words, each of the lines that make up the image has 16,000 pixels. And of the lines at 16,000 pixels, there are 8,640, or more than 132 million points in each image. At 30 frames per second for video, the result is spectacular, as we saw with U2. Double world record broken: largest LED screen and highest resolution. Technologically, there are no two like it.
17,500 seats, 17,500 speakers
Many also doubted the Sphere’s ability to host a concert in good conditions. Acoustics know it well: obtaining quality sound in a spherical building – especially in the largest in the world – is impossible. So, since it was not possible to do like everywhere else, with very large speakers placed strategically, the idea was to add sound to each seat.
Each of the 17,500 seats is therefore equipped with its own speaker system with directional, individualized, controlled sound. For the projection of a film, this allows, for example, to send the version in Chinese or French, in one row, while the rest of the Sphere benefits from the original version.
We can even speak of a complete sensory experience, because, under the Sphere, there is a ventilation system capable of reproducing, in the room, gusts of wind, sending out fog and even odors: scents of undergrowth or even the scent of cookies. And then, 10,000 seats are also equipped with haptic feedback: vibrators like in video game controllers.
And soon in London before New York?
The enthusiasm is such that a second sphere is being planned, this time in London. Before a third, perhaps, in New York where James Dolan, the boss of the Sphere, uses technology not only to show off. At Madison Square Garden, which he also owns, he uses facial recognition and artificial intelligence to refuse entry to spectators registered for publicly criticizing him, and also to lawyers who defend his opponents.
Advertising rates are, in any case, commensurate with this extraordinary visibility: 450,000 dollars, or more than half a million euros, to be displayed 24 hours on the exterior screens of the Las Vegas sphere.