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The MSG Sphere: Evolving the Large Scale Immersive Experience
Richard Welsh
Deluxe SVP of Innovation
Roman Sick
HOLOPLOT GmbH CEO
Eric Cantrell
7thSense Design Ltd. Director of Marketing
Deluxe SVP of Innovation Richard Welsh says the MSG Sphere is ‟probably the biggest, most elaborate manifestation of all of the technologies that you might experience in a cinema-like environment now, translated to a huge, huge space.”
Welsh, who also served as moderator for the SMPTE Future of Cinema conference session dedicated to a behind-the-scenes look at the Sphere, describes it as a ‟culmination of” many technologies developed to ‟take an audience to another place.”
HOLOPLOT founder/CEO Roman Sick and 7thSense Design Director of Marketing Eric Cantrell joined Welsh in Vegas to explore and explain some of the technologies that enable the Sphere and venues like it, as well as what audiences might encounter inside.
Sick focused his talk on the audio elements of immersive content and experiences — particularly salient ahead of U2’s upcoming Achtung Baby Live show.) He discussed acoustics issues and solving for the optimal ‟direct to reverberant ratio” in challenging environments using technologies, including three-dimensional audio beamforming.
Read more: Inside U2’s Boundary-Breaking Immersive Live Show
Cantrell’s presentation centered on the visual challenges presented by live immersive experiences. After all, ‟LCD domes are not rectangles.” The additional dimensionality requires working with the Z-axis requires creators to ‟bend” and therefore ‟sacrifice some pixels.” That’s just one example of the different ways of working required for exceptional displays at the Sphere.
Watch the full recording (above) of the ‟Large Scale Immersive Experiences” session, part of SMPTE’s Future of Cinema conference at NAB Show 2023, to learn more.