Phish turned Las Vegas' Sphere into the ultimate music visualizer | Hacker News Reader

Phish turned Las Vegas' Sphere into the ultimate music visualizer

theverge.com

33 pointsTomte21 comments

Any articles on the engineering behind the Sphere? How do they get the data to each individual pixel?

Let's assume 10 pixels per inch. One square foot would be 14,400 pixels. A PC can easily drive 1920x1080, or 2 million pixels. At our dpi, that would be 140 square feet. The Sphere's display is 160,000 square feet. So we could split that up into 1100 nodes, where each node is 140 square feet. It would be realistic to have each node be a single ARM computer with enough storage for a couple of hours of video. Push the data to the node over ethernet before the show, then have a clock signal going to each node so they stay synchronized.

Here's what I found about the underlying system https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/the-software-behind-the-hi... and the Hitachi Vantara Press Release: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/news/gl240307

"27 nodes, with 4PB of flash storage for playback within Sphere and streamed in real-time to 7thSense media servers, each streaming 4K video at 60 frames per second"

I would be interested to better understand how synchronization is achieved here. Is that a relatively solved problem for applications such as this or was there significant engineering to achieve it at this scale?

Yeah it's pretty well solved. You can buy players at retail for many years. I'm not sure what products handle this much scale seamlessly but Brightsign is the one I always preferred. I haven't gone past 4 players but it's really easy to send it a gigantic video and the software will send crops to different players and play them in sync. We did like a 10k display for very up close viewing and there was no code to write or anything. Just spend the money and run the cables.

> I would be interested to better understand how synchronization is achieved here.

not OP, but worked on similar large displays stitched together using multiple servers with their own GPUs

for most applications, TouchDesigner running on each server was used to arrange media on screens connected to that server as a single group, and software Sync (https://derivative.ca/UserGuide/Sync) kept media playing across different groups within a frame or two at worst. for stricter (higher budget) installations, the GPUs were chosen to have native hardware framelock-type features, but you can connect a surprising amount of displays to a single machine if you get the right server motherboard (digital signage is a big customer of those kinds of rigs)

syncing the audio with the room speakers was a completely different story

It is not that dense. Sounds like the interior and exterior are both 16K resolution and exterior pixel pitch is quite large at 225mm. Article below says it uses 30 computers to run things but thats unclear if it is both outside and inside or just inside.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-REJHfi4x5U

https://www.techradar.com/pro/worlds-only-16k-display-is-pow...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(venue)

No, having each panel be that smart would be way too expensive. Not knowing the Sphere's specific setups, typical concert/stage setups have "dumb" panels are just screens with no bezel so they can be positioned edge to edge in what ever configuration for size/shape you need. After that, they are all connected back to a central system to control the signals to each of the screens.

Also, loading the content to each "smart" panel as you describe would be an absolute nightmare, and very time consuming. That's not how a roadie thinks.

At that viewing distance the pixels are probably far enough apart to stick your pinky between them. If you're ever close enough to a digital billboard you can ran your hand over it and it's like a bed of nails. LEDs on little stalks. The metric is called "pixel pitch". And there's loads of software and hardware options for running massive displays. There are some beefy PCs with like 8 HDMI outs, splitters, combiners. Or more likely you split the video into multiple segments and then use software to keep multiple players in sync.

I had college roommates who loved Phish. While I respect the musical skill, I found that the music was torture unless I was intoxicated with large quantities of cannabis. Small quantities made it tolerable.

That being said, the Sphere is an engineering wonder and I hope the owners are able to get the finances nailed down.

I was there night one, and am going again tonight and can firmly say this was the most immersive and impressive concert experience of my life. The sense of presence of being in that building is amazing, and seeing “the world” react to completely live music (especially on copious amounts of drugs) is magical. I think that’s the part that is hard to convey outside of being there. It can really feel like the world is reacting to music, which makes all those inner music videos you think up while listening (well I do lol) feel possible.

"greatest drug venue imaginable"

Big fan of the Sphere and U2 do amazing things with it but what I saw from Phish was pretty low effort -- it's such a one off canvas you can see when someone has taken the time to make content just for that surface and when it's a bit more cut and paste and trim the edges in Unreal. $2B to build and I guess an sdk to go along with it was considered too much ? Still at $15k/min of external display time as a billboard there is good reason to make sure what you throw at the pixels is as good as you can get.

They had to put together ~14 hours of visuals, more than 5x what U2 had to do. There's nothing low effort about that. Some visuals were not as good as others as a result but I can promise you that the audience had their jaws on the floor all four nights.

I was expecting this to be an article about a phishing attack that allowed some rando to run his own fun stuff on the Sphere. Of course, the ultimate use of the Sphere would be to project a BSOD on the outside.

Pretty impressive whether you like Phish or not. Ringo needs to borrow this visual to sing Octopus's Garden in the Sphere: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fWMlWLYHcgc

I didn’t realize the inside of the sphere was also a big screen, just like the outside. Amazing.

It seems there is very little content that plays well on a giant … sphere

The sphere are being very aggressively about writing and sending articles to major news sites as paid advertisements...

I suppose it's to be expected since they spent $2.3bil on a music venue and sell tickets for hundreds to thousands per seat.

Also, it seems they keep the outside lit and that can't be cheap in the desert.

Correct. They are having difficulties making it break even, let alone profitable.

It really is an engineering marvel, and I hope they can figure out the finances.

Their first quarter reported a significant loss but the revenue only occurred in the last week of that quarter. It remains to be seen for sure, if they make money, but I think they have a good chance.

If it does take off, I can see a few pop up in large metro areas to provide unique concert experience to music lovers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com