U2 played the first-ever show at the Las Vegas Sphere, a massive, dome-shaped venue wrapped in over a million LEDs. The concert, a live performance centered on the band’s Achtung, Baby album, was also the band’s first in a series of performances it will put on at the venue through the end of December. The cheapest tickets for the shows that haven’t sold out yet start at about $400, as of this writing.
From videos being posted to social media, it looks like shows at The Sphere can be breathtaking, probably more than a little nauseating, and undoubtedly expensive to produce.
A review in The New York Times says the concert alternated between gigantic, trippy visual effects sweeping across the domed display and the more standard concert screen fare of band close-ups. From this YouTube video of the first song, “Zoo Station,” it looks like the show began with the latter:
But sometimes, things looked absolutely out of control, with wild animations spanning the entirety of the screen in ways that must be completely disorienting for our lizard brains. People were just losing it. I can’t say I blame them:
Just look at this part while the band played “The Fly” and all the text transforms into a tunnel extending up into the sky:
This video from casinocompwallet on TikTok shows what the LEDs actually look like. Sphere Entertainment says each of these pucks contains 48 diodes, is about eight inches apart, and can show 256 million colors:
