{"id":846439,"date":"2023-12-11T11:18:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-11T19:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/?p=846439"},"modified":"2023-11-27T14:16:15","modified_gmt":"2023-11-27T22:16:15","slug":"sphere-postcard-from-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/blog\/sphere-postcard-from-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Sphere: Postcard from Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Since the first digital displays started illuminating the outside dome on July 4 and especially after it opened on September 29 for the first U2 concert and October 5 for the premiere of the movie Postcard from Earth<\/em>, Sphere has garnered international acclaim as the future of entertainment. We checked out the \u201cSphere Experience,\u201d as the whole movie-going adventure is called, as soon as we could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We attended the 7 p.m. show and parked in the Howard Hughes garage (see below for a link to the parking details). It\u2019s a 10-minute walk to the arena, but the exosphere displays build the excitement every step of the way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The world\u2019s largest exterior screen, it comprises 580,000 square feet of fully programmable LED bulbs, 1.2 million of them, each about the size of a hockey puck and holding 48 diodes that can accommodate 256 million colors. (This screen has more than four times the surface area of the Fremont Street Experience.) The closer you get, the more the display dissolves as the individual bulbs gain definition; it\u2019s amazing each combines with the rest to produce such high resolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the 7 p.m. show was the first of the day (there are also 2:30 and 4:30 p.m. shows on some days), the doors were open before the start time on the ticket; we don\u2019t know exactly when. Inside, the eight-story Atrium offers a number of attractions and concessions. Overhead is a massive mobile of metallic hoops. Five humanoid robots, dubbed Aura, hold court and gather large crowds; each focuses on an aspect of human development (connection, innovation, creativity, longevity, and productivity). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The lobby also boasts two 360-degree \u201cavatar scanners\u201d; these scan your entire body, then email you a video of your avatar in a virtual world in 3D (very long lines by the time we got there). Plaques scattered around the walls display some of the equations used by engineers in Sphere\u2019s construction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The most attention-grabbing display was a 50-foot-tall hanging holographic structure that changed continually into bright and unusual images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You get an hour (or more) in the Atrium before the movie starts, exactly an hour after the ticket time. If you want to eat or drink, the concessions consist of several bars, three cuisines, and snack bar. Everything, as you can easily imagine, is pricey. The Atrium Kitchen offers hot dogs for $8, waffle fries for $7, and burgers, bulgogi, poke rice bowl, chicken tenders, and andouille sausage $14-$20. The Cantina serves chicharrones with lobster guac tacos, and steak torta $16-$19. The Taphouse\u2019s tri tip, fish and chips, and tenders and fries are $17-$20. Peanuts, popcorn, and snacks are $6-$10, while beer is $18-$19, cocktails $15-$16), margaritas $20, Red Bull $8, and water and soda $7.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the time comes, you head up the dizzying escalators, find your seat (and find another link for the seating details below), and get ready to watch the most immense, immersive, and impressive movie the world has ever seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Postcard from Earth<\/em> starts with a spaceship taking off from Earth, one male and one female sleeping deeply. We won\u2019t give away the plot, but the \u201cpostcard from Earth\u201d is a way for them to remember where they come from. We also won\u2019t give away the first effects, other to say that they are, in a word, astounding. The ultra-high 16K resolution (meaning 16,000 vertical and horizontal LED lights) on a curving 270-degree 160,000-square-foot, screen, almost four acres and 20 times larger than the largest IMAX screen, largest in the world) is an experience you won\u2019t soon forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The \u201cpostcard\u201d returns to Earth with helicopter-eye views of panoramic land and seascapes\u2014mountains, forests, plains, the Grand Canyon, underwater\u2014as the movie delves into the history of the planet and starts to develop the theme of \u201clife inventing itself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Every frame of footage was shot via a lens that combined 11 individual cameras to create a one-foot-diameter wide-angle fish eye for the massive super-clear views at 170 million pixels of resolution. In addition, thanks to the haptic effects (vibrating seats and 167,000 speaker drivers, amplifiers and processing channels for the audio), you can actually feel the footsteps 100-foot-tall elephants and the stampede of a herd of humongous horses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the idyllic naturescapes, the scenery turns decidedly human, culminating with cars, planes, and pedestrians accelerating to hyperspeeds to illustrate the pollution and destruction of Earth, \u201cmankind ignoring every warning.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From there it\u2019s ruins, cemeteries, floods, deserts, and storms, with more special effects enhancing the action on the screen, then it\u2019s back into space to rejoin the intergalactic travelers, waking up, heading out onto their new planet, doing the Garden of Eden, reinventing life. The inevitable conclusion is, to us anyway, a bit melodramatic, but it\u2019s certainly life-affirming and green! The movie is 50 minutes long, though it\u2019s so riveting, it feels like 15.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The future of entertainment? Postcard from Earth<\/em> is certainly the biggest and highest-resolution movie anyone\u2019s ever seen. You\u2019ll also see in our seating post, however, that the prices are nothing if not prohibitive. That didn\u2019t stop thousands from attending the movie with us or the horde who lined up in the hallway all the way back to the Venetian we all passed by as we were herded out.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One detail we\u2019ve seen is especially intriguing: live action. The Sphere’s creative team has confirmed that they\u2019ve placed cameras in Antarctica, with plans to install another on the International Space Station. A real-time surround-view live hookup to a working space station 250 miles above the Earth? If that movie shows up at Sphere, we’ll be there to experience it\u2014prohibitive prices and all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s your link for the parking details<\/a><\/span><\/strong>. And this one’s for the seats and prices<\/span><\/strong><\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the first digital displays started illuminating the outside dome on July 4 and especially after it opened on September 29 for the first U2 concert and October 5 for the premiere of the movie Postcard from Earth, Sphere has garnered international acclaim as the future of entertainment. We checked out the \u201cSphere Experience,\u201d as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":846486,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1447,1453],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/sphere-postcard-from-earth-3.jpg?fit=701%2C628&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846439"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/846486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}