First look inside the immersive Sphere arena in Las Vegas, which opened with a U2 concert.
It squats on the Las Vegas skyline like an enormous spaceship, black and mysterious – until night falls, when it will glow like the Earth from space.
The MSG Sphere won’t open to the public for almost three more months, when U2 christens the entertainment venue with a series of concerts. But anticipation is growing.
Cue the superlatives. At 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, it’s being billed as the world’s largest spherical structure. Its bowl-shaped theater reportedly contains the world’s highest-resolution wraparound LED screen. And its exterior is fitted with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LEDs that can be programmed to flash dynamic imagery on a massive scale – again, reportedly the world’s largest. It was fully illuminated for the first time Tuesday night to celebrate the Fourth of July.
It started as a crude sketch — a circle with a stick person inside. Seven years later, that drawing has been made real: A $2.3 billion massive spherical venue, standing 366 feet (111 meters) high and lighting up the Las Vegas skyline.
The drawing was initially made by James Dolan, the executive chair of Madison Square Garden and owner of the New York Knicks and Rangers. He and MSG Ventures CEO David Dibble were trying to create a plan to give the entertainment venue industry a facelift in Las Vegas.
Both experimented with different shapes for the structure — such as a muffin, a box and even a pyramid — until Dolan drew the circle and stick person on a notebook. At that moment, the Sphere was born. “It really is a new medium,” said Dolan, speaking to the media during a walkthrough Thursday. “When you’re in the Sphere, you don’t get told what to look at. The audience decides what they want to focus on.”
Inside the 516-foot-wide (157-meter-wide) Sphere, a high-resolution LED screen wraps halfway around the 17,500-seat audience. The venue is equipped with thousands of speakers that will deliver a “crystal-clear,” multi-layered experience.
The venue features an array of technology attractions, including five interactive humanoid robots named Aura.
