All about The Sphere...

Trish and I recently spent a week at the Author Nation conference in Las Vegas. We were so busy learning and being inspired by other authors that we hardly even had time to leave the hotel. However, our room had a great view of the skyline, including the amazing new structure called The Sphere.
This beautiful but rather gaudy structure is a wonder of technological achievement, so I thought you might want to know some interesting facts about it.

First, The Sphere is the largest spherical building in the world, at 366 feet (111 m) tall and 516 feet (157 m) wide. For reference, the Statue of Liberty (including the statue and the pedestal) is 306 feet tall and could easily fit inside The Sphere. To position the pieces, they used the fourth largest crane in the world, which had to be brought from Belgium for this job.

The exterior shell is actually an elaborate spherical video screen, consisting of 1.2 million programmable LEDs. That's 580,000 square feet (53,880 square m) of screen. The videos are clearly visible even in daylight. And, from what we could tell, the videos run 24 hours a day. Of course, Vegas is illuminated by countless other gaudy light displays, so what's another 1.2 million more?

Although I haven't seen the inside, it's supposedly just as impressive, if not even more so. The inside is a concert stadium with 18,600 seats, and with standing room for another 20,000 people. Get this... 10,000 of those seats are extra special. They provide an immersive experience, with specialized sound systems, haptic seats that make the guests “feel” sound vibrations, and machines that create wind, temperature, and even scent effects. I'm not even kidding.

Yes, there's a concert stage, but the interior screen is the highest resolution screen in the world (268 million video pixels with 16K resolution). Supposedly, this makes it ten times clearer than the best HD TVs on the market today. To make sure the concerts are loud enough, there are 1,586 loudspeakers.

So, you might be thinking... Cool, I want to experience it! Or maybe... Yuck, that's too much light and sound!

At least now you know more about it.