|
|
 
|
|
Author
|
Topic: Las Vegas "Sphere" will be a great big round ball o' fun
|
Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
|
posted 12-10-2018 09:48 PM
Well this looks interesting. It's like they're taking the "Fremont Street Experience" and wrapping it around a giant ball. The "157,000 ultra-directional speakers" thing is intriguing.
Inside the Insane Concert Venue of the Future
The MSG Sphere in Las Vegas, the world’s most audaciously advanced concert venue, is ready to blow your mind
By BRIAN HIATT
If you were a billionaire CEO who wanted to create the world’s most audaciously advanced concert venue, what would you do? If the answer is “Stick 157,000 ultra-directional speakers, a three-and-a-half-acre spherical ultra-high-res video screen and vibrating floors into a enormous dome built from scratch,” you’re thinking like actual billionaire James Dolan, whose Madison Square Garden Company broke ground on the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas in September.
As MSG Ventures CEO David Dibble tells it, the project began in Dolan’s office. “He turned to me and he said ‘Dibble, let’s reinvent the live entertainment business,'” Dibble says. “Technology has been an afterthought: ‘Let’s get the building built, then what kind of tech are we gonna do?’ Jim Dolan said nope, we’re gonna do tech from the beginning. It’s gonna be a technology-driven design.”
Touring acts can certainly play the MSG Sphere, but the venue seems geared for residencies and special projects that could fully exploit its capabilities. The video screen arcs up and over the audience “like a planetarium times ten,” Dibble says, adding up to “the largest display ever imagined on Earth.” (And unlike a planetarium, it’s made of LED panels, rather than projected from the ground.)
The speakers are from a German start-up, Holoplot, that specializes in targeting narrow soundbeams, so each section gets its own sound (per MSG, audio in different languages could even be beamed to different sections).They’ve also figured out how to hide the speakers in the venue’s walls, behind the video display. Those vibrating floors, meanwhile, are all about the bass. “We have developed a haptic flooring system,” says Dibble. “It’s still a bit of a work in progress, but the lowest bass response, instead of being transmitted through the air, is literally transmitted through the floor, directly into your feet or onto the chair in which you sit, and it’s a remarkable experience.”
In addition to musical residencies, MSG is pondering other, more radical uses for their Sphere. Ideas range from esports to “mass gaming” on the big screen (in other words, playing video games with 19,000 of your closest friends) to immersive storytelling experiences that they hope will feel like “VR without the goggles” to… well, the Rockettes. With another Sphere planned for London, MSG’s hopes are high. “Three years from now,” Dolan promised reporters at the ground-breaking, “you’ll say, ‘I had no idea this was what it was going to be.’ It is that crazy and that incredible of a project.”
MSG Sphere at The Venetian by the numbers
18,000: Number of seats in the performance venue.
400,000: Square footage of the building.
63: Acreage of the construction site at Sands Avenue between Manhattan Street and Koval Lane.
360: Height of the venue in feet.
500: Diameter of the sphere in feet.
170,000: Square footage of the indoor spherical digital indoor display pane.
2: Gigabytes per second captured by a super-resolution video camera system to project images inside the sphere.
580,000: Square footage of the fully programmable exterior building surface.
1,100: Length of the pedestrian bridge in feet from the Sands Expo & Convention Center.
3,500: Estimated number of local construction worker jobs on the site.
4,400: Estimated number of permanent jobs the facility will provide.
$730 million: Estimated annual economic impact of the facility.
$48 million: Estimated tax revenue to be generated annually by the facility.
The rare Rolling Stone article that isn't about Trump in some fashion
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
All times are Central (GMT -6:00)
|
|
Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM
6.3.1.2
The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion
and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.
|
Home
Printer-friendly view of this topic