A new Sphere is being built — get ready for another crazy desert dome showstopper
It's not in London. It's not in Paris, and it's not (yet) in Seoul
Seen those viral clips of the giant LED sphere in Las Vegas? There’s a second one coming to Abu Dhabi.
The Las Vegas Sphere X account announced Abu Dhabi will be the second location for one of the giant otherworldly spheres, a venue that promises to let you “experience events, concerts, and shows like never before.”
Most of us will only have experienced the Sphere on social media to date. But it’s a pretty daunting and impressive structure.
The Las Vegas Sphere is 111m tall and can accommodate up to 20,000 people, a couple thousand less when seated. The outer display that makes it ever-so-Instagrammable is made up of 1.2 million LEDs, spread across approximately 580,800 square feet of lit-up surface.
The tech nerds among you may be surprised to hear those outer LEDs represent less than half the number of pixels you see in a Full HD display. But, hey, we’re not watching movies on it.
That’s left to the giant screens inside. The inner screen occupies 160,000 square feet and has a resolution of 19,000 by 13,500 pixels.
And what do they do with all that power? This is Las Vegas, so of course they've used it to show U2's flashy concert visuals for its public gig series debut. The Eagles are also set to play the Las Vegas Sphere this weekend, as part of a residency at the venue that stretches into 2025.
What limited tickets are available for the early 2025 The Eagles shows will cost you $800 or more per seat. The Sphere clearly isn’t a venue for everyone.
Even the basic Sphere experience, which lets you meet a robot in the lobby and watch some super-high-res immersive content on the massive inner screen, costs almost $100 before tax. Why so pricey? The Las Vegas Sphere cost an estimated $2.3 billion to build.
You can get an idea of what the experience is like from this tour by YouTube channel ViewFromTheCheapSeats.
There were originally plans to make a Sphere venue in London, outed back in 2018. This would have been built around the Olympic Park area and, just like the Las Vegas version, would provide space for up to 18,000 seated patrons.
The plans were abandoned in November 2023.
Other cities that have been in talks to get Sphere’d up include South Korea’s Seoul and Los Angeles.