With the launch of the new MSG Sphere dome in Las Vegas last month, the city is now home to perhaps the most technically immersive live entertainment experience in the world. The dome-shaped theater features a giant 360-degree wraparound video display that wraps up, over, and around the audience, creating a fully-immersive visual environment for audiences seated in the 17,600 seat theater. The dome itself measures 516 feet wide and stands 366 feet tall with 580,000 square feet total. The 160,000 square foot LED display, featuring 16Kx16K resolution, with the ability to display 256 colors on skyline, is billed as the highest resolution LED screen in the world.
When MSG Entertainment, which built the $2 billion+ facility wanted to launch the Sphere with great fanfare, it turned to iconic band U2, which signed on to be the “house band” through the end of the year.
Over the years, U2 has demonstrated its affinity for pushing the technology envelope and at the Sphere, that love for eye-popping video and immersive sound is in full view.
One of the companies behind U2’s live concert visuals is disguise, a U.K.-based provider of the software that has powered the visual effects behind the Irish band as well as, more recently Taylor Swift and Ed Sheehan for nearly two decades now.
At the time disguise signed on to U2’s Vertigo tour in 2005, the company was more of a creative agency, according to Peter Kirkup, solutions and innovation director.
“We were creating visuals for the screen and then our software ended up being the software that drove these screens because it was kind of handwritten to drive the visuals for those things,” Kirkup said. “And over the last 20 years as U2 progressed their music career, our company has evolved from being a content agency to being a standalone media server business and a bit of a global powerhouse of the live entertainment industry.”
U2 used disguise’s 3D vizualization software to not only display visuals but to also provide a preview, giving the tour’s designers a detailed view of how the visuals would look in a live venue.
“Our software is all based around the 3d visualization of the project to where you have a 3D model of the stage and see what the visuals are gonna look like,” Kirkup said. “That piece of the software—the very first version of that was written for the Vertigo tour in 2003. And it's still central to the software.”
For U2’s show at the Sphere, disguise worked with Stefan Desmidt, tecnical director and video director for the Fuse Technical Group, which has designed the visuals for U2 concerts for decades.
“He's in charge of all the video systems and also live cutting the cameras during the shows and making the decision of which cameras go up onto the big screens and so on—and he's been doing that with U2 longer than we've been in business,” Kirkup said.
The 360 degree video “canvas” that makes up the interior of the dome theater is unlike anything else in the world currently, so the challenge of how to fill and coordinate the video on those screens posed an immense challenge, according to Kirkup
“The Sphere is an incredible canvas,” Kirkup said. “It's 16k by 16k pixels to be dealt with, to put video out onto, but also when you're doing a U2 concert, you don't just want to hit play and run the video; you've actually got to be able to respond to the band. You've got to create images up on the screen from the cameras and you've got to be able to be you know those moments when the band decide that they want to bring Lady Gaga on stage, for example and do an extra song that they haven't planned for. The system has to be able to cope for that.”
Disguise designed the system for U2’s visuals in collaboration with U2’s tech team but a number of questions needed to be addressed initially, according to Kirkup.
“How did our system need to look in order to facilitate one of those pixels but also meet all of the other tech requirements in the venue for redundancy, for networking and remote locations for servers and all that sort?” Kirkup mused. “It was layers and layers and coming back to the details.”
Twenty-three of Disguise’s gx3 flagship servers are fitted with 30TB of storage each, meaning a total of 690TB of drives are available to play the 60fps content at a moment’s notice, according to Kirkup, adding that the system uses Upstream 100G networking to connect storage and slicing servers to the production system.
“We play the videos produced by a content company, and we're also rendering in real time all of the real time visuals,” Kirkup said. “So that's taking the video feeds from cameras, feeding them through the Notch real time content engine, —which runs on our servers as well—and then feeding the final pixels out to the end processing system that's part of the house system within Sphere. So we're sort of interfacing with the house system but also all of the show production equipment like cameras and triggers from the band's backline and so on as well.”
disguise began working with Fuse in February and a 10 member team worked round the clock to meet the October deadline, which is among the company’s most challenging projects to date.
“There are certainly moments of the show where we push the system really to its edges,” Kirkup said. “We're doing not just a single layer of video playback, but we're also capturing video from cinematic cameras, and we're bringing that into the system. We're treating that in a real time content engine to be able to dynamically adjust the image that's coming from those cameras to either apply a lot to it or even to do more creative things. And then potentially we're also playing a layer of alpha video on top of that, so we were compositing and mixing media as well.”
Kirkup has seen the show several times and likens it to his first with virtual reality.
“It's a visually amazing experience, it really does sort of take you over,” he said. “It’s like the first time you try VR but this is something similar but different to that because it's a shared experience rather than an isolated experience. This is totally immersing all of your fields of view.”
