It’s the latest madness made in Las Vegas: a spherical concert hall with the largest LED screen in the world. If the experience is impressive, so is the cost.
“The Sphere”, the sphere in French, was inaugurated at the beginning of October, with great fanfare with a first concert by the group U2 who will perform around twenty shows there by the end of December. It has been almost two years since the performance hall should have opened its doors, but Covid had largely delayed the work. The wait was worth it according to the first spectators emerging from this incredible structure. It also lives up to its name since it is a large ball 110 meters high and 155 meters wide. It is visible from a long distance in Las Vegas, where the landscape is already cluttered with, among other things, a false pyramid and a false Eiffel Tower.
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A triple XL version of the Géode in Paris
But “The Sphere” has something more: an exterior screen that covers the entire sphere. It is the largest LED screen in the world, with an area equivalent to more than seven football fields. We have already seen a giant planisphere, a basketball, or even a gigantic eye displayed, enough to make motorists stop.
Inside there is a spherical auditorium with around 18,000 seats. A bit like a triple XL version of our Géode in Paris. “The Sphere” has nearly 170,000 speakers. Not to mention vibrating seats and technologies to generate air currents or odors, for a sensory experience. But the highlight of the show is an immersive 15,000 square meter high definition screen which can display absolutely anything, like a gigantic setting in which the viewer’s eye is lost with the scene below. Director Darren Aronofsky was also commissioned to direct a film Postcard from Earth“A postcard from the Earth” in French, which began to be broadcast there, between two concerts, to exploit the possibilities of the place.
An economical and ecological cost
“The Sphere” cost $2.3 billion, which will have to be repaid. And first with tickets between 270 and 1240 dollars to see U2. Another solution to fill the coffers: advertisements displayed on the screen outside the room at $450,000 per day or $650,000 per week.
The cost is also ecological. The designers of the room estimated with local authorities that they would need nearly 100,000 MWh per year. That is to say approximately the consumption of 20,000 French households. The owners affirm, but only in the long term, that they want to use 70% of solar energy. “The Sphere” is also a huge visual pollution that will probably not bother too much on the Las Vegas Strip, but much more so in Stratford in east London, where the construction of a similar room is planned. The residents of the neighborhood are angry. Our good old little concert halls with their approximate sound system and their musty smell still have, we hope, a bright future ahead of them.