On Friday, September 29, U2 lit up the stage of the Sphere in Las Vegas with the opening night of their highly-anticipated U2:UV Achtung Baby Live series at the world’s most cutting-edge venue.
Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Bram van den Berg performed two sets of Achtung Baby tunes plus a lengthy encore of hits standing on a Brian Eno-inspired turntable stage. U2 utilized every part of Sphere’s LED screen, offering the world’s largest and highest-resolution, with an awe-inspiring gallery of visual art showcasing bespoke art from artists including Es Devlin, John Gerrard, Marco Brambilla, and Industrial Light & Magic.
U2 provided fans a fully immersive experience featuring top of the line technology offered at Sphere, which is reinventing the live music experience with the world’s highest-resolution LED screen on the interior of the Sphere, spanning four acres and surrounding the stage and audience, creating a completely immersive visual environment.
The four-football field long interior screen hovers 240 feet above the stage, with a steel framework supporting the 160,000-square-foot screen and the 160,000-speaker Holoplot multilayered audio system weighs about 730 tons.
Outside of Sphere, the Exosphere is the largest LED screen on Earth consists of approximately 1.2 million LED pucks across 580,000 square feet of surface, with each puck containing 48 individual LED diodes, and each diode capable of displaying 256 million different colors, all combining to create an unmistakably vivid landmark on the Las Vegas skyline.
The Exosphere displays a wide range of custom artistic and branded content, attracting worldwide interest as a result of the venue being photographed and shared widely on social media daily.
The state-of-the-art Sphere Immersive Sound, developed by Holoplot and considered to be the world’s most advanced audio system, provides the world’s largest, fully integrated concert-grade audio system and will revolutionize immersive audio experiences. A system of 1,600 permanently installed and 300 mobile Holoplot X1 Matrix Array loudspeaker modules includes a total of 167,000 individually amplified loudspeaker drivers. Using Holoplot’s next-generation 3D Audio-Beamforming and Wave Field Synthesis technology, the audio is transformed for delivery in large-scale venues such as Sphere.
The result is a controlled, consistent and crystal-clear concert-grade audio for audiences of up to 20,000 people, providing individual audience members with a personalized listening experience, whether sitting in the front or back rows. At Sphere, you may not see the sound system as the entire apparatus is completely hidden behind the 160,000-square-foot interior LED display plane.
So with this ground-breaking audio-visual venue at their disposal, U2 celebrated an historic live music milestone with fans from all over the world and VIP attendees including Dr. Dre, Jimmy Kimmel, John Starks, Paul McCartney, Sheryl Sandberg, Snoop Dogg and many more.
The show was the first in a 25-date run of shows that celebrates the band’s acclaimed album Achtung Baby, as well as its accompanying and industry-defining ZOO TV Tour in 1991. U2 also performed a new song, “Atomic City,” an homage to the magnetic spirit of 70’s post-punk with a nod to Blondie, whose pioneering work with Giorgio Moroder inspired and influenced the band.
The name “Atomic City” is also a 1950s nickname for Las Vegas from a time when nuclear fascination swept the nation and the city promoted itself as a center of atomic tourism due to its proximity to the Nevada Test Site.
U2 – Sphere, Las Vegas, NC – September 29, 2023
Achtung Baby Part 1: Zoo Station, The Fly, Even Better Than the Real Thing, Mysterious Ways, One,
Until the End of the World, Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses, Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World
Turntable Set: All I Want Is You, Desire, Angel of Harlem, Love Rescue Me
Achtung Baby Part 2: So Cruel, Acrobat, Ultraviolet (Light My Way), Love Is Blindness
Encore: Elevation, My Way, Atomic City, Vertigo, Where the Streets Have No Name, With or Without You, Beautiful Day
Sphere has also announced the first movie studio collaboration with Dreamworks Animation for the upcoming Trolls Band Together. A brand campaign specifically designed for the Exosphere – the fully programmable LED exterior of Sphere in Las Vegas – Trolls Band Together, which hits theaters nationwide on November 17.
We’re thrilled to have the innovative and imaginative DreamWorks Animation be the first movie studio to collaborate on a bespoke marketing campaign for the Exosphere. The Exosphere’s larger-than-life canvas has become the premier platform for brands looking to tell their stories on an unparalleled scale, reaching audiences across the globe from the heart of Las Vegas.
David Hopkinson, President and Chief Operating Officer of MSG Sports
DreamWorks collaborated with Sphere Studios, Sphere’s in-house creative studio, to develop custom animated content featuring beloved characters from the movie alongside kaleidoscopic art from the film. The week-long campaign began September 25, and will include a special takeover of the venue on the night of September 28 to countdown to the release of *NSYNC’s new single “Better Place” on September 29, which will be featured in Trolls Band Together.
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