Viva Vision Upgrade | Las Vegas Advisor

My husband and I went downtown over Christmas for the first time since the Fremont Street canopy was upgraded and we couldn't believe how much the quality has been improved! It was even bright during the day! Could you please give us the stats on the upgrade -- number of bulbs, etc.

Fremont Street was closed permanently to vehicular traffic in September 1994 as part of the plan to regenerate the downtown area. On December 14, 1995, the Fremont Street Experience Light and Sound show, a.k.a. Viva Vision, debuted, financed by a group of 10 downtown hotel-casinos, eager to give their locale a new draw. It was then, and is still touted to be, the world's largest video screen.

With an original price tag of $900,000, the canopy is 90 feet high at the peak and four blocks (approximately 1,500 feet) in length. It's supported by 16 columns, each weighing 26,000 pounds, and 43,000 struts. When it debuted, it featured approximately 2.1 million lightbulbs controlled by 32 computers. Six years later in 2001, the original 350,000-watt sound system was upgraded to 550,000 watts.

Four years after that in 2005, Viva Vision received a $17 million upgrade, with 12.5 million LED (light-emitting diode) lamps. The number of computers required to control it was reduced to 10.

A third upgrade was completed in time in December 2019, with the new Viva Vision debuting on New Year's Eve. (To paraphrase the immortal words of Bob Seger, Oh, if only we didn't know now what we didn't know then.) The $32 million project started in early May and took seven and a half months to complete.

The new screen now has just under 50 million LEDs, four times as many as it did between 2005 and last year. They produce four times the resolution and as much as seven times the brightness as before. It's so bright that, as the question states, its display can operate 24/7. We can personally attest to the fact that it's quite staggering, almost psychedelic, in its vividness, depending on the display.

Next upgrade: 3D?

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Kevin Rough Jan-31-2021

Slight error

Fremont Street was not closed permanently to vehicular traffic.  A portion of Fremont Street was closed permanently to vehicular traffic.  You can still drive on Fremont Street east of Las Vegas Blvd.

Kevin Lewis Jan-31-2021

Added benefit

The downtown casinos noticed that people were going to bed too early. They'd quit gambling and hit the sack as early as 10 or 11 pm. Now, the FSE keeps all that from happening. After a night or two of being blasted awake at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, downtown hotel guests just give up and stay out all night pounding the slots. That pays for all the light bulbs! Genius!

(Decades ago, they were going to hire people to walk up and down the hotel corridors all night playing trumpet solos, but that came with too much overhead.)

The FSE is kinda cool the first time. It's OK the second time. It's annoying the third time. It's infuriating the fourth time, to the point where you want to go back inside the casinos just to get away from it. The obvious solution is to be progressively more drunk each time you see it. Downtown visitors have eagerly embraced that approach.

Question of the Day - 31 January 2021

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