Las Vegas is home to plenty of extravagant hotels, casinos, artists and stage shows, but this building takes the prize! The Sphere is nothing less than a gigantic, spherical “LED sphere” covered with LEDs both inside and out.
The Sphere is located close to the fashionable hotel The Venetian Resort, located on The Strip, the main street in Las Vegas. The fascinating structure was lit for the first time for the 4th of July (Independence Day) celebrations. The project was started by Madison Square Garden Company (MSG) in 2018, and it reportedly cost a whopping $2.3 billion to build Sphere.
The world’s largest LED screens – inside and out
The enormous structure will be the world’s largest spherical building, 112 metres high and 157 metres wide. On the outside, 1.2 million LEDs the size of hockey pucks are mounted, which together can display dynamic images on an enormous scale. We don’t even want to think about the power consumption! But it costs a lot to attract attention in “Sin City”.
And that’s not all: On the inside, there’s also a huge, immersive LED screen with a resolution of 16K. Here, the screen size is not measured in inches, but in square metres. More specifically, 15,000 square metres. In comparison, the screen on the side of the Resorts World hotel in Las Vegas is “only” 9,300 square metres.
A colossal cinema, concert and entertainment arena
The Sphere will function as a futuristic entertainment arena with room for up to 40,000 spectators. The plan is to host films, concerts, e-sports events and MMA fights. The Sphere also has a colossal 3D surround sound speaker system consisting of 164,000(!) speakers all the way round.
The company behind it, Sphere Entertainment, is currently filming various video productions to be shown inside the sphere. Imagine IMAX and Dolby Atmos on steroids and you might have an idea of what this could sound and feel like! 4D effects such as scent and air pressure will also be possible.
One thing’s for sure, we’ll definitely be checking this building out when we visit Las Vegas and CES in January!
The Sphere will officially open on 29 September this year, when U2 will premiere their concert show U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere. Take a look at the inside of The Sphere with U2 in the video below.
