What Is the Large Domed Structure Being Built near the Venetian?

What is the large dome-shaped structure being built back by the Wynn employee parking garage?

That's the MSG Sphere.

The MSG stands for Madison Square Garden (not monosodium glutamate), which is funding the project in a joint venture with Las Vegas Sands and whose subsidiary MSG Entertainment is managing it.

It's a long-planned 17,500-seat arena that's being built on an 18-acre site south of Sands Avenue and east of Koval Lane on a sort of interface between the Venetian/Palazzo and Wynn/Encore. (You can read about the curious location in another QoD we wrote on the subject about a year ago.) 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 spherical performing-arts venue -- 360 feet tall, 500 feet across, and encompassing 400,000 square feet -- will cost upwards of $2 billion when it's completed sometime in 2023, but will be among the most technologically advanced entertainment centers in the world.

]The exterior will be, in effect, a huge video screen, fully programmable for advertising and other content. 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, 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 other Spheres around the world; the next one has been proposed for the Stratford area of London. But Las Vegas’ Sphere will be the world’s first.

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Dave_Miller_DJTB Jun-13-2021

$2billion

So they’re building this thing, for about the same price as it cost to build the Allegiant stadium, but without any public funding or hotel room tax. 

Makes you wonder/think…

Ronald Jun-13-2021

Dave_Miller answer

So they built City Center for $5 Billion w/no public money... it's a private venture like any other - so what?  - this isn't to draw a national sports team to the area to boost all revenues - just theirs.

Mr. Seafood 21 Jun-13-2021

Traffic congestion

Traffic is already a nightmare on Koval between Flamingo and the entrance to Harrah's/Venetian. The whole area behind Flamingo, The Linq and Harrah's needs to have another access/exit point. They closed one of the side streets when the Big Wheel was built and it has only gotten worse since then. It seems that traffic issues are not thought through when these new projects are planned.

Gene Brown Jun-13-2021

Get Over It!

It’s Vegas, Baby! Build it and people will come! Whoever is concerned about traffic congestion in that area, steer clear! Vegas is forever reinventing herself. Let it be!

Kevin Lewis Jun-13-2021

Thanks for clarifying

When I saw the nascent structure a couple of months ago, given the location and size, I thought it was a storage facility for Steve Wynn's ego.

Roy Furukawa Jun-13-2021

@Dave_Miller_DJTB...

Remember, that's the home of the Raiders... and it's not just a team name, it's a lifestyle for the Davis family, just ask the city of Irwindale and the $20MM they lost trying to woo them to their city.  :D

AL Jun-13-2021

Other languages?

I'm intrigued by the statement "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."  So, without headphones or wires, just how is this going to work?  When sound comes out of a speaker, it doesn't travel like a laser beam; it spreads both horizontally and vertically such that people who are not directly in front of the speaker can hear it without any problem. If a speaker is transmitting audio in Spanish, but all the other speakers surrounding it are transmitting in English, I would think that the group of English-transmitting speakers would drown out the single Spanish transmission, or at least severely out-sound it such that it couldn't be clearly discerned. This technology needs explaining.

VegasROX Jun-14-2021

City Center Cost

I think I read that the original estimate to build City Center was right at 4 billion and the actual total came in over 9 billion.  A billion just doesn't go as far as it used to.

Question of the Day - 13 June 2021

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