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The Tech & Numbers Inside the MSG Sphere
🌐 NFL Toy Story Telecast, Goodbye Aperture
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Welcome to another edition of VP Land. We’ve got a very immersive edition today.
In this issue…
🌏 The tech inside the MSG Sphere
🏈 NFL goes to Toy Story
📷 RIP to Apple’s Aperture
Let’s jump into it!
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MAIN STAGE
The MSG Sphere by the Numbers
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It’s been nearly impossible to miss on social media: the Las Vegas MSG Sphere.
We’ve seen the exterior light up for months and now we finally got a look inside with U2’s opening concert (Darren Aronofsky’s specially created immersive film Postcard From Earth premieres tomorrow. We previously covered the specially made camera they’re using to film it.)
The U2 x Las Vegas Sphere show took two years to create and will make ~$270m.
In Fall 2021, the band was approached to open the $2.3B mega-structure (with a capacity of 18k).
Willie Williams — U2’s creative director since the early 1980s — initially thought it was a “terrible… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Trung Phan (@TrungTPhan)
4:02 PM • Oct 1, 2023
Let’s look at some of the mindblowing numbers behind the 8th wonder of the world.
Mega Structure: The MSG Sphere, standing 366ft tall x 516ft wide, is currently the world's largest spherical building. It has a seated capacity of 17,600 and a standing capacity of 20,000.
Unparalleled Visuals: The Sphere boasts the largest LED screen on Earth — both externally and internally. Its exterior offers a fully programmable 580,000 sq ft LED display. Inside, attendees are enveloped by a 160,000 sq ft screen with a staggering 16K x 16K resolution, the equivalent of 72 HD TVs or a 12k screen resolution (Noah Kadner has a write-up on the SACO custom LED tech).
Sonic Evolution: Dome venues typically suffer from audio issues. The Sphere overcomes this with a groundbreaking approach: 168,000 speakers offering spatial audio based on HOLOPLOT's X1 speaker module. Every seat is equipped with its own speaker, ensuring studio-quality sound for every audience member (CEO Roman Sick has more on this accomplishment).
Unpopular opinion but the $2.3 billion MSG Sphere is one of the coolest things the US has built in a long time.
(h/t @VegasIssues)
— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano)
2:19 PM • Oct 4, 2023
How much to play a video on the sphere?
The pitch deck to buy out a day on the sphere has been circulating online. The cost?
$450,000 for a day
$650,000 for the week
The MSG Sphere cost $2.3B to build
They charge $450k for one day of advertising
Here's their pitch deck:
— PitchDeckGuy (@BetterPitchGuy)
2:55 PM • Oct 2, 2023
The price tag does include working with MSG’s design team on creative.
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SECOND UNIT
To Volumetric Sports, and Beyond
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If you watched the Atlanta Falcons vs Jacksonville Jaguars NFL game this past Sunday, you had an option to watch an alternate telecast - inside Andy’s bedroom from Toy Story.
Each player had a chip in their shoulder pad to track movement, which combined with Hawkeye optical tracking to animate the CG characters in real-time.
The companies behind the tech and broadcast include ESPN’s Edge Innovation Center, Next Gen Stats, Beyond Sports, and Silver Spoon.
Toy Story is a fun theme, but this is also a step towards creating volumetric sports broadcasts, which was teased at in the launch video for the Vision Pro with a 3D NBA game.
As John LePore points out, another sport that’s been very data-centric and would be primed for a volumetric broadcast is Formula 1 (which Apple made a bid on for global broadcast rights).
Wembley Stadium vs. Andy's room.
📺: ESPN+/Disney+
— NFL (@NFL)
2:03 PM • Oct 1, 2023
@espn It’s the #littlethings #Disney100 #slinkydog #ToyStory
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VIDEO VILLAGE
🔥MoCap Anybody🔥
#NeurIPS2023 We propose *SMPLer-X*, the first generalist foundation model for 3D/4D human motion capture from monocular inputs.
- Project: caizhongang.github.io/projects/SMPLe…
- Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2309.17448
- Code: github.com/caizhongang/SM…
- Demo: youtube.com/watch?v=DepTqb…— Ziwei Liu (@liuziwei7)
2:00 PM • Oct 2, 2023
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AKS
🌐 Around the Web
👾 VashiVisuals posted an in-depth Unreal Engine virtual production tutorial with Thiago Carneiro
🌄 Comments from an Apple developer on the decision to discontinue their popular photo editing app Aperture.
🎯 Sony’s strong hardware play: Increase the stakes in virtual production business
🌐 Schedule posts and track your social media with Metricool*
🗣 Zelda Williams is not a fan of using AI to replicate her late father Robin Williams' voice
🏟️ Bluebox reconnects with ROE Visual to collaborate on a new extended reality studio
* Sponsored Link
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CALL SHEET
📆 Upcoming Events
October 6
Cuebric AI Academy: Prompting - 101
Remote via Discord
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October 10 to 11 (other dates and cities available)
Sony’s Professional Display Solutions Roadshow
Sony Corporation, New York City
Meet Sony’s sales and engineering teams to experience hands-on demonstrations of unrivaled display and AV technologies and solutions
October 21 to 23
Gen:48 short film competition
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October 23 to 27 (other dates available)
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Planar Headquarters, Hillsboro, OR
Learn about VPXR technologies from industry experts
October 24 to 26
10th Edition Augmented Enterprise Summit
Houston, TX
World's biggest companies leveraging XR/Metaverse today and preparing for the future of work
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