With its opening in September 2023, the Las Vegas Sphere has set a new benchmark in the entertainment industry. The experience inside is next level, with a screen that spans across the entire ceiling, haptic seats, and a sound system that sends different audio tracks to each seat. The Sphere can even generate wind and scents.
Sitting here should make you feel like being part of the movie. And to achieve that no expense or effort was spared. They literally spent $2.
3billion on creating this next level cinema experience. But how does all of this actually work? Let's take a look behind the curtain of the Sphere and explore the different technologies.
For this video we partnered up with Jared Owen, who built a very detailed model of the Las Vegas Sphere. It's truly impressive, so please show some support on his channel as well. The Madison Square Garden company, otherwise known as MSG, announced the Sphere in 2018.
These are the same people behind Radio City Music Hall, the Chicago Theatre and, you guessed it, Madison Square Garden - so they already had experience with building entertainment venues. But with the Sphere they took things to another level. They selected the best people from every industry and brought them together to fulfill their vision - to reinvent live entertainment.
5 years later, the Sphere opened for business. And with an exterior like this, it of course immediately drew attention. This is the Exosphere - the biggest screen in the world.
It was designed by SACO, the company behind some of the world’s most amazing light shows and screens. When they came to Vegas, they’d just finished their work on the world's tallest building. SACO designed and installed the media facade on the Burj Khalifa - and then immediately set out to break their own record.
The Exosphere is 3 and a half times bigger than the screen inside. And as we get closer to the screen, it doesn’t look like the screen on your television or phone. But it actually works the same way.
That’s because screens are made up of pixels. On normal displays, these pixels are simply three, tiny, lights, known as subpixels. Each is a different color - red, green and blue.
By combining these lights in different intensities, we can produce millions of different colors. And when you put thousands of pixels together, and stand back a little, the distinction between the individual pixels becomes blurred. The Exosphere works in the same way, except that everything is way bigger.
It’s covered in 1. 2 million individual lights; each one about the size of a hockey puck. These lights work kind of like the individual pixels on your TV, except that here each contains a cluster of 48 separate LEDs.
As you can see here, each cluster is actually quite far away from each other, so if you’re standing closer to the sphere it looks like this. But if you’re viewing from a distance, as is intended, the lights blend and the image comes together. It's crazy that you get such a sharp image when you look at it from a distance.
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We first enter the Atrium: Here they have a collection of cutting-edge audio and visual technology but what immediately sticks out is this, the Hypervsn Wall. Whilst the images look 3-dimensional, it’s actually a clever optical illusion. Remember those little handheld fans with lights on the blades?
Well, the holographic wall basically works the same way. Hundreds of little rotors, each with four blades, or rays, are attached to the wall. Each one is fitted with LEDs and they spin at 670 rpm.
So it is comparable to a helicopter, probably even faster than many. This makes it too fast for the human eye to see. And that’s why it's possible to display all kinds of sequences.
Looks pretty amazing, right? But that’s not all. Dotted around the Atrium you can talk to 5 robots.
This is Aura. One of the most advanced humanoid robots in the world. Designed by an English company called Engineered Arts over the last 15 years, Aura is a combination of advanced robotics and machine learning.
They don’t walk around, but their upper bodies move as they speak to visitors, answer questions and give presentations on the technology used at the Sphere. The engineers describe Aura as “artificially intelligent” rather than “an artificial intelligence”. They built it to run a wide variety of software, including large-language models like ChatGPT, voice recognition software like Whisper and facial-recognition technology like Google’s MediaPipe.
The combination of all this software makes it possible to interact with Aura. Over time, Aura will learn from visitors and improve their ability to hold conversations. They’re already pretty good though and they even make jokes!
After spending some time with Aura, visitors move into the theater for the main attraction. This is the Sphere’s main screen. It’s roughly 20 times larger than the biggest IMAX cinemas and curves over and around the audience.
It’s made of tiles, covered in LEDs that are thin enough to bend to the curve of the Sphere. They’re actually so thin that sound can pass through them, but we’ll come back to that later. The screen has 256,000,000 pixels, making it the highest resolution screen in the world.
At first glance you could assume that this screen must be super sharp. But that isn’t the case. Actually quite the opposite is true.
Since the surface is so huge, 160,000 square feet or over 14800 square meters to be exact, it only has around 3. 33 pixels per inch. For comparison.
The latest Iphone has 460 pixels per inch. A larger TV has around 40-80. Despite that, the Sphere’s Screen still looks great.
And this is because it's a matter of distance. The Optimum Viewing Distance is the ideal distance between a screen and the audience. The screen in the theater looks crystal clear from the seats but would start to break up into individual pixels if you get closer to it.
You can actually test this at home. Hold your phone close to a screen, then zoom in as far as you can. If your camera is good enough, you should be able to see each pixel broken down into the red, green and blue subpixels we talked about before.
That’s because you are now way below the optimum user distance. The designers, SACO, had to keep all of this in mind when building the screen. And there was another much more difficult issue.
Normal cameras, that capture film for flat rectangular screens, didn’t work for such a big wrap-around display. So, the film-makers had to get creative. MSG set up a new company, Sphere Studios, to produce content specifically for the Sphere.
They even build a quarter-sized replica in California to edit the films for the Sphere, which they call the Big Dome. On a normal screen you just couldn’t see how it would look in the Sphere. In the beginning, they welded 11 separate cameras together and tried stitching the footage together in post-production.
But shooting and editing turned out to be way too complicated. With no suitable alternative on the market, Sphere Studios decided to build their own. And they ended up making what many consider to be the best video camera ever produced.
This is the Big Sky Camera System. It’s a 316 mega-pixel camera, shooting 18k film at 120 frames per second. In other words, it films in a super high resolution and everything looks super smooth.
The quality is actually so high, that one second of film takes up 60GB of data. And that’s not the only inconvenient thing about Big Sky. It actually takes 12 people to operate it!
Those 11 cameras from the first model have been replaced by one enormous lens. It measures 1ft across and bulges out like a fish-eye. This gives it a 165 degree field of view - big enough to cover the whole screen in the sphere.
And to have some additional room for “overshoot and stabilization” of the footage. But the lens is only one part of the camera. A sensor is also required to capture the images.
And Big Sky’s sensor is a record breaker as well! Sphere Studios partnered with STMicroelectronics to produce the biggest sensor in commercial cinema used anywhere in the world. Here’s how it works: The lens bends incoming light rays to converge them onto a focal point.
These light rays are then captured by the sensor, which sits behind the lens. The sensor breaks them down into individual pixels and sends electrical signals for each pixel. These signals can then be further processed to produce a digital image.
In normal cases, the sensor is a rectangle, which corresponds to normal TVs. But the Sphere is no normal TV! To produce an image that fits onto the Sphere’s enormous screen, Sphere Studios and STMicroelectronics used an almost squared sensor.
This way it's much better to convert the image. Overall their new system is so ground-breaking that Sphere Studios have actually filed 10 patents for Big Sky’s technology alone. And because looking at these images on a normal screen doesn’t really work, the crew uses a VR headset when filming to check that they’ve got the right angle.
Big Sky is one of the most technically advanced items involved with the Sphere. But there is something that’s equally impressive - the sound system! SOUND SYSTEM To match the visuals, the Sphere needed something truly amazing in terms of sound.
That’s why it contains some of the world’s most advanced audio technology, designed by German engineers Holoplot. Hidden behind the Sphere’s wrap-around screen are 167,000 speakers. That works out at 8.
4 speakers per person! And remember we talked about the super thin LED screens earlier? Well, they had to make them so thin to allow the sound to pass through without being disrupted.
It’s called Audio Transparency and Holoplot had to work hand-in-hand with screen designers SACO in order to pull it off. What’s special about this system is that it can send targeted sound to every seat in the audience, providing custom audio to different parts of the theater. But how is that possible?
Take a sound wave, which looks something like this. If you layer another wave on top of it, aligning the peaks, it will amplify the sound and make it louder. That’s constructive interference.
If, however, you layer two waves like this, aligning the peaks with the troughs, the two waves will cancel each other out - That’s destructive interference. Noise-canceling headphones actually work by using a combination of these interference patterns. Coming out of a speaker, a wave looks like this, with the sound coming out in all directions.
When there’s more than one speaker, the different soundwaves all mix together and create interference, causing differences in the sounds levels across space. Holoplot’s speakers run extremely complicated calculations to work out where every individual soundwave will interfere with another one. And then they change the moment that the speakers emit certain waves and alter the volume, to coordinate every single interference and therefore control which noise reaches which area of the room.
The result is kind of like the difference between a lightbulb and a laser beam. A lightbulb sends out light in all directions, like a traditional speaker, whereas a laser beam sends a focussed beam of light. This beam is what the Holoplot speakers produce in terms of sound.
Using this technology, the Sphere can choose the audio track that they send to different parts of the audience, providing different languages, soundtracks and experiences to different sections of the theater. It sounds complicated, right? Well, it is.
It’s one of the most advanced sound systems anywhere in the world. They’re describing it as “headset sound, without the headset”. If you enjoyed this video so far, subscribe to MegaBuilds!
This would help us reach even more people & put out better and better quality for you :) So thanks a lot! And in true Sphere style, even the seats add to the experience. 10,000 of the 18,600 seats in the theater are fitted with “haptic technology” meaning that the seats can move.
During performances, they vibrate at specific frequencies that correspond with what the audience are seeing and hearing. It sounds like a gimmick but it’s said to really add to the experience. On top of that, wind machines generate anything from gentle breezes to strong gusts, and even smells and fog!
Though the team do say that they are careful not to overload the senses. By this point you might be wondering how the Sphere is bringing all of this together. Well, for now, they’re running two types of shows.
The first is a live show, with artists like U2 and Phish putting on a multi-media performance that looks pretty mind-blowing. The sound system delivers perfect audio to everyone in the audience and the visuals go from making the sphere look like a massive concrete silo with a skylight, to a wide open desert. Not to mention whatever this thing is.
The second is part of the Sphere Immersive Experience. Guests go through the Atrium, speaking to all 5 Aura robots before watching a film called “Postcard from Earth” in the theater. This film by Darren Aronofsky is the first to be shot on the Big Sky System and tells the story of human development and achievement.
Tickets prices range from $79 to over 300 dollars, so there are definitely debates whether it is actually worth the price. Other films are in the works but take a lot of time to produce, and sports events, like UFC 306, are also scheduled for the Sphere later in the year. It’s not yet clear how that will look, but seeing live combat sports in full Sphere immersion sounds pretty crazy!
Looking to the future, other Spheres are in the pipeline as well. Until recently, the most likely seemed to be in London, and MSG has even bought the land to build it on. However, concern from local residents about light pollution caused the Mayor of London to reject the proposal and MSG ultimately decided to abandon the project.
Abu Dhabi, South Korea and Saudi Arabia have all expressed interest in their own sphere and though MSG has held talks with all of them, for now, nothing is sure. In the near future, Sphere Studios plan to take Big Sky to the International Space Station. They want to film a space walk in real dimensions and transport viewers beyond the atmosphere.
Would you like to visit the Sphere one day? And if some of you have already been there, would you say it's worth it? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
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