A Today’s News item mentioned something called the Sphere that’s coming to Las Vegas. I hadn’t heard anything about it and I tend to keep up on Vegas news (a lot by reading TN). Can you give us more details?
Happy to — we especially like questions that come from other pages on this website.
The Sphere is the long-planned 18,000-seat arena that’s a joint venture between Madison Square Garden and Las Vegas Sands. It will be built, starting later this year, on a 63-acre lot behind the Venetian/Palazzo and it’s expected to be completed in 2020. It will be connected to the Sands Expo Center and Wynn Las Vegas by a 25-foot-wide pedestrian bridge (32 feet above the street level, but under the Monorail track).
The sphere itself will be 360 feet tall and 500 feet across, encompassing 400,000 square feet. The exterior will be, in effect, a huge video screen, fully programmable for advertising. Inside, likewise, the bowl of the dome will feature what’s being touted as “the largest and highest-resolution media display on Earth.”
The acoustics in the arena will also be the highest tech yet invented, delivering “crystal clear audio to every seat in the house” through the use of what’s known as “planar waves” and “beamforming,” which can be focused with “laser-sharp precision, thanks to thousands of tiny speakers embedded in the building’s walls.” So there won’t be any corruption or deterioration of the sound quality anywhere in the huge arena.
Also, as noted in the Today’s News item, this tech allows sound to be directed with such precision that different languages can be sent to specific seats without the use of headphones or wires.
Madison Square Garden has announced that it will develop Spheres around the world; the next one will open in London at Olympic Park. But Las Vegas’ Sphere will be the world’s first.
