The Sphere is about to be open for business

Two weeks from today, the Sphere – a 366-foot-tall orb located in Las Vegas with the ability to project virtually any image/scene onto itself – will host its first concert.

And it’s been a long time coming.

🔮 Background: The project – the brainchild of Knicks’ owner James Dolan – began the better part of a decade ago, with the goal of building an event venue boasting 17,500 seats, an interior wallpapered with “the highest-resolution LED screen on Earth,” and a glowing exterior that made it look in early renderings like a fireball dropped from the sky, Bloomberg reports.

And the proposed spectacle didn’t stop there.

• During the day, the Sphere would sit as a tourist attraction, outdoing a giant-screened IMAX theater experience with its own superpumped arsenal of “immersive entertainment” flourishes, including wind effects, temperature shifts, seats shaking, and scents wafting through the building, per Bloomberg.
• Then at night, the plan was to invite the world’s bigger musical acts to perform and experiment with the Sphere’s novel technology.

This vision is about to become a reality. U2 will be headlining a series of kickoff shows that begin September 29. And after that point, the Sphere, which cost ~$2.3 billion to construct, will be open for business, with another one currently being constructed in London. Which begs the question – is this the future of in-person entertainment?