Last month, during a cross country road trip across the entire US, we booked to see Darren Aronofsky’s showcase film at the MGM Sphere in Las Vegas – “Postcard from Earth”.
I’d been excited to see this as the technology as I’d met a couple of musicians a few weeks before, from Asutralia, who had said it was just an astounding venue. And the stats sounded completely insane:
- 18,600 seats
- A 16K wraparound screen that covers 160,000 square feet and over 170 million pixels
- 1600 speaker arrays and 167,000 speaker drivers
- $2.3bn build cost
HOWEVER. It’s not cheap. even to watch a 75 minute film, the cheapest seats we could find were $105 each but if I had the opportunity I’d go again tomorrow. The resolution of the film was stunning – from underwater shots to the arches at Moab – it reminded me of Koyaanisqatsi albeit in super high resolution on. a screen that puts the IMAX in Waterloo to shame.
Outside its quite remarkable too – the LED’s apparently are capable of showing 256m colours (8 bit), costs $450,000 a day to advertise on and needs 28 megawatts to power (enough to power 21,000 homes). A helicopter is the only way to really see how incredible this is.
