How Las Vegas' Sphere Actually Works

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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