The best virtual reality (VR) experiences I’ve had this year weren’t the $500 Quest 3 glasses or the $3,500 Apple Vision Pro; and I didn’t even have to wear glasses. Sure, it cost $2.3 billion, but it included soundtrack a live performance by an iconic rock band.
I mean of course U2 concert from last weekend in Sphere in Las Vegas, a giant facility located in close proximity to the Strip. It seems like something out of a Jordan Peele movie or a modern Kafkaesque story in which a concert venue wakes up one day to find it has become a giant eyeball that advertisers use to promote things like NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube TV in its nearly 54-square-foot skin 000 square meters (580,000 square feet). The Sphere, the brainchild of James Dolan, CEO of Madison Square Garden Entertainment and a not-so-well-respected figure in New York City, bills itself as the future of entertainment. And this is not an absurd demand.
A truly immersive experience at The Sphere with U2
Last weekend, I walked into The Sphere’s spacious atrium and then into the amphitheater, along with 18,000 other people. Its 118-meter (388-foot) interior wall, covered with a 16K video panel that stretched to the ceiling and about 170 degrees horizontally as far as the eye can see without turning its head, seemed part of an ancient sci-fi castle steampunk. The DJ kept the crowd going wild and the atmosphere was like a music festival with a touch of Thunderdome.
Then U2 took the stage, a simple raised circle platform designed by Brian Eno that resembled a record player. The Irish rockers were there to open The Sphere, the first of 25 shows as part of a multi-month residency. As they began to play, cracks appeared on the wall of the virtual castle and dust began to come out. Then it disappeared, and for the next two hours a series of 16K moving images were projected, occupying our entire field of vision and being completely immersive. The sound came from 168,000 speakers hidden behind the screen.
You know the movie Throne, in which someone is dragged into a video game? Being Inside The Sphere was a real-life sci-fi movie in which 18,000 people suddenly found themselves inside an 80s music video. An ultra-high-definition screen transcended the uncanny valley, showing landscapes of real and imagined locations that convincingly created the impression that the band and audience had been transported to uncanny places. Was collages dizzyingly detailed, one of which is a tribute to Elvis, who at the time was dethroned as the King of Las Vegas by a giant swarm of pixels. Another time, the images of the band members themselves were depicted in real time by thirty-meter Goliaths. When the pictures started moving towards us or scrolled down, we got a sense of virtual reality to be really moves.
Essentially, Sphere is an ultra-high-bandwidth conduit for huge streams of digital information, with its own server farm and over 1,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cable. Willie Williams, the band’s longtime artistic director, commissioned a number of artists to create a virtual environment to transport everyone through time and space. The concert was designed for U2 to perform an entire album of their classics Attention child, in addition to other successes. As expected, the song “Dizziness“. When U2 performed their new single “Atomic city“, the band was in front of a bright Strip of Las Vegas, with cars driving through the streets and planes flying in the background. Then the buildings collapsed and suddenly began to spin in the desert – how the same land must have looked before the appearance of civilization. The most spectacular effect came towards the end, when it appeared that U2 were performing “A beautiful day” In front of a huge lake and floating on the water… a giant sphere. As the song progressed, the huge object came closer and we saw a hole in its side eventually swallow us all. The belly of this beast was filled with birds, fish, snakes and other fauna. Being itself.
After the show, some critics and music purists wondered if it made the music worse. Even Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, who first signed U2, told a small gathering this week that while he enjoyed the event, he felt the music had fallen by the wayside. And I understand that. U2 is a machine rock and roll well oiled and perfectly able to hold the attention of a gigantic crowd. But at times I felt like I was in one of those Boston Pops scenes where John Williams leads the orchestra to accompany the film. Star Wars what with Superman with a live soundtrack. Your eyes are irresistibly drawn to moving images, not to music. “It’s like a fistfight between the band and the immersive screen,” said The Edge, U2’s guitarist and lifelong technophile, when we spoke a few days after the show. “It’s like a fist fight. But every night we win.”
