Sphere's Exosphere is the world's largest LED screen, not a hologram

What you see

From outside, Las Vegas's Sphere presents a continuous curved surface, the Exosphere, lit with moving imagery visible for miles, described in the operator's own July 2023 announcement as the world's largest LED screen. Inside, ticketholders sit surrounded by a second screen that, per Sphere Entertainment's October 2023 announcement, wraps up, over and around the audience to a height of 240 feet. Both surfaces are opaque, direct-view LED screens; nothing is projected onto glass or foil, and no 3D glasses or headset are issued.

How it works

Sphere Entertainment's own account names the exterior as roughly 1.2 million addressable LED pucks spaced eight inches apart, each with 48 diodes capable of 256 million colors, developed with Montreal's SACO Technologies. The interior display is stated at 16,000-by-16,000 pixel resolution across more than three acres of LED surface, called by the company the highest resolution LED screen in the world, driven by playback hardware from 7thSense streaming video to dozens of media servers over an SMPTE ST 2110 network. Both figures are the company's own, not independently audited, but they describe a named diode technology, not a light field or interference pattern.

Viewing conditions and limits

Because both screens are direct-view LED, anyone facing them sees the same image regardless of angle within a wide viewing cone, unlike a light-field or lenticular display that changes what each eye sees; there is no personalized 3D depth beyond whatever the video content simulates. The exterior is visible in daylight and from public streets, part of its advertised function as a canvas for brand content; the interior requires a ticketed seat inside a fully enclosed venue. Sphere Entertainment Co. opened the venue to the public on 29 September 2023, per its own October 2023 release, with the Exosphere switched on for a test broadcast that July.

What it is not

Sphere is not a hologram or a volumetric display in any sense: both surfaces are conventional, if unusually large and dense, LED screens, the same base technology found in stadium video boards, scaled up and wrapped around a spherical structure. It should also not be confused with projection mapping, since nothing is thrown from a separate projector onto the building; every pixel is emitted directly by the diode array. The company's own materials describe LED hardware and named suppliers throughout, never framing either screen as an optical illusion of depth beyond what the video content shows.

• What independent measurement, if any, exists for the claimed 16K-by-16K interior resolution and the world's-largest exterior-screen claim?
• How does Sphere Studios distinguish, in its own materials, live-camera feed content from pre-rendered generative content shown on the Exosphere?
• What power and cooling infrastructure does an LED array of this density require, and has the company published that detail?

Sphere's own press materials are unusually specific about hardware, puck counts, diode counts, resolution and named suppliers, which makes it an easy case for stating the mechanism plainly: an enormous LED screen, not a hologram, light field or volumetric display. Readers should still treat the company's scale claims as vendor-reported until an independent source measures them.