New Sphere Touted For Vegas Would Have 170,000 Sq. Ft. High-Rez LED Display

May 25, 2018 by Dave Haynes

Las Vegas is up there with Dubai and China for over-the-top buildings and attractions, but a new entertainment complex touted to be open in 2-3 years may top them all.

The MSG Sphere is giant see-through ball that will house an 18,000 seat concert and events venue. The Sphere would be 360-feet-tall and 500-feet-wide, and have what I think might be the largest high-rez LED screen on the planet. The video display surrounding the seating area would be roughly 170,000 square feet, or about 42 IMAX movie screens all tiled together.

Huge. There is a slightly bigger LED display in China, but it is a relatively low resolution canopy, similar to Fremont Street in Vegas.

The Sphere is supposed to break ground soon on a 63-acre site in behind the Venetian properties and east of the Sands Expo Center. There is a lot of dead land out there, and this one is used for outdoor storage. If you are one of the miserable souls like me who has been to Las Vegas way too many times, you’d see the site from the monorail, opposite the golf course behind the Wynn (which is making way for some sort of water park … who cares about drought???).

The Sphere floor will have an adaptive acoustic thing going in the floor, using haptics, so people could feel the bass lines from a song, or the rumble of a truck during an automaker product launch.

The idea is that the venue could be used for concerts, product launches and e-gaming tournaments.

Given the timelines are tight, my guess is the LED vendor selection is already at the short-list stage, or even settled. If not, the eyes of several LED account executives with Vegas as their territory are getting big reading this. That size of order doesn’t make your quarter. It makes your career.

It also looks like the Sphere would have transparent LED around the exterior.

One hell of a lot of projects in Vegas get announced but never built. It could be the same here, but the MSG is Madison Square Gardens – so this is not some slick-haired, nicely-suited dreamer touting an idea. They have money.

MSG has plans for another one in London, UK.

Leave a comment