The Sphere in Vegas (nd)

[Rich B]

I imagine the inside isn't completely spherical....

[Jobbo]

I imagine the inside isn't completely spherical....

If only there were videos to show us what the inside is like...

Part of a sphere has the same reflective properties as the whole.

[Gavster]

Just one thing. Isn't the inside of a ball terrible for acoustics?

Considering they spent over £2bn I reckon there's a small chance they realised that and may have had the foresight to get an acoustic engineer on the project to design a clever solution.

[mik]

The whole thing and everything about it is a governmental construct to fool the Mercun populace into believing that the earth isn't flat. Including this thread.

[ZedLeg]

The whole zoned sound thing sounds even worse tbh. If you're in a chair listening to a speaker 6 feet from you, you might as well be at home .

[Mito Man]

Just wait till you find out about lip syncing

[ZedLeg]

Give me a punk band in a pub backroom over this nonsense any day

[tim]

Christ what a racket…

Fixed that for you.

[KiwiDave]

A circular venue sounds like it’ll have only one seat with perfect acoustics.

#Sheldon

[unzippy]

We have tickets for Sunday night, they're playing all of Achtung Baby which is one of my favourite albums ever. Ticket price? $130 each for standing.

Trying to avoid spoilers but have seen a few of the videos which look mind blowing. Will be great to see how different acts use the audio and video technology inside.

Well jel Mike, enjoy!

[Ascender]

Show was epic. The venue is incredible in terms of audio quality and the size & resolution of the screen.

I think the first video captures the scale of it - this was the most "full on" thing they did with the visuals and a couple of people had to leave for a break as the downward scrolling made it look like the stage was rising if you focused on it. Very trippy.

There were lots of very clever uses of the screen rather than just turning it up to 11 - sometimes it was scaled right back. Often just used as a canvas to play against or some portions for showing videos of the band members.

The screen goes up and wraps over your head, so with a few of the videos - a desert landscape and the Vegas skyline - its almost like the outer wall has gone transparent or you're standing outside.

There's clearly a fine line to tread where the screen could overwhelm who you're watching and listening-to and distract from that part of it so will be interesting to see what other artists do with it. Using it as an IMAX screen on steroids could work well although its a big venue to just be watching something at rather than the participation of being at a gig.



Also, about 2 mins 20 in to this video there's a transition which in person standing down near the front was just mind-boggling to see in-person.

[Gavster]

That looks absolutely amazing!

[scotta]

That's some batshit crazy stuff. Bono sounds terrible though!

[MikeHunt]

Look at this, you think "only in Vegas" but ive heard the next one will be in Stratford, London.

[Gavster]

Yup, they've been proposing it for 5+ years and the local residents have been fighting it. However, given how Stratford is slowly being turned into a new eastern centre for London and is inexplicably called 'Stratford City' despite not being a city, I expect the plans to ultimately get the green light. I'm more than happy to have it here!

[KiwiDave]

I would love to know how the video elements work - it's hardly like dropping an .mov file onto a hard drive is it? In that first clip there seemed to be lots of nested live feeds from cameras running on the band, so there must be at the very least multiple sections of video running concurrently and some clever software running over the top of it. If a band came to you and said 'we want to commission a 120m video piece for showing at the Sphere', like what does your output and end product look like when you hand it over to the band or the venue? How the fuck do you process it and edit it?

Nerd central.

And as much as U2 are way past their best I can't actually think of many other 'spectacle' bands who'd make better use of that to open the venue with. It's not like the Stones or Springsteen lean heavily into visuals in their shows normally. Coldplay maybe? But they're just as marginalised in taste these days.

The band I would LOVE to see make use of that is Tool. Can you imagine what fucking insanity they'd come up with?

[RobYob]

Tool would be awesome.

Rammstein would be another.

[integrale_evo]

I don’t know, I think I’m more interested in how they built it and got such a seamless looking ‘screen’ than the image processing stuff. Only because most huge display screens are usually pretty poor quality and have very noticeable lines and variation between areas.

I guess we’re kind of spoilt by the processing power we have in our pockets for real time capture and manipulation. Things like 360 cameras stitching together a full view from two heavily fisheyed cameras and being able to rotate and zoom at will to edit it to an image that works on a flat screen with your fingertips is pretty much taken for granted.

[Jobbo]

Amusingly they have got pi wrong:

[Gavster]

I would love to know how the video elements work - it's hardly like dropping an .mov file onto a hard drive is it? In that first clip there seemed to be lots of nested live feeds from cameras running on the band, so there must be at the very least multiple sections of video running concurrently and some clever software running over the top of it. If a band came to you and said 'we want to commission a 120m video piece for showing at the Sphere', like what does your output and end product look like when you hand it over to the band or the venue? How the fuck do you process it and edit it?

Nerd central.

And as much as U2 are way past their best I can't actually think of many other 'spectacle' bands who'd make better use of that to open the venue with. It's not like the Stones or Springsteen lean heavily into visuals in their shows normally. Coldplay maybe? But they're just as marginalised in taste these days.

The band I would LOVE to see make use of that is Tool. Can you imagine what fucking insanity they'd come up with?

The video designers are now bigger than the band for that performance, which is completely mental. Obviously they wouldn't have a job without U2, but all U2 need to do is turn up and play songs they know by rote. The video designers needed to do something quite spectacular.

Coldplay would absolutely smash it out the park.