Definitely will always be populated by cool abstract spherical visualizations and not eventually just a giant spherical billboard…
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Traffic issues around a giant-ass video display? INCONCIEVABLE! /sarcasm
(We have a resort here in the valley that has a much smaller-scale system attached to the hotel wing of the building; it’s not really that visible in daylight unless you are close up to it, but at night from the freeway near it, the display looks pretty cool. It’s also not as bright from that distance, because of the rubbernecking and traffic issues that it would cause. )
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well, they are LEDs, so it’s probably not as bad as one would guess.
we tried to get U2 tickets, and it was already sold out before they really went on sale. i guess they reached out through their superfans on their website list first, and that’s that. i’m sad, because it would’ve been a great weekend getaway for us.
as for the sphere, up here in Reno we’re taking bets on how long it lasts before they start selling the exterior for advertising, turning it into a giant spherical billboard.
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First up is Darren Aronofsky, who they hired to create a 40ish minute exclusive “unique film experience” and is in post on it.
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My buddy’s been the supervising programmer on the tech build-out, remote from Los Angeles. It’s been an amazing sight - and on the inside, the entire interior is like a single convex screen covering it, displaying graphics in 16K.
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I was going with the Michael Schenker Group (Michael Schenker Group - Wikipedia) but, yeah, I guess that works too! 
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The company that I work for uses the same audio supplier. It is voodoo kit.
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I already spotted NBA Summer League, but just wow. The definition of that basketball.
It’s pretty cool looking. I think the earth at night was my favorite.
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So how long until someone hacks the display and starts showing porn on this thing?
Actually a windows blue screen would be pretty funny
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By day it’s just the Presidential Palace.
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I don’t get too upset about the fact that a few major cities light up the sky with this kind of stuff, but I’d hate to see it become more common. Light pollution is a real issue for both stargazers and a number of animal species, and I’m glad that a lot of cities have been taking steps to address it with more efficient, nightime-color-appropriate municipal lighting and other regulations.
I just returned from a road trip where I was able to clearly see the milky way for the first time in years. People deserve to have that opportunity.
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You are probably thinking of Hong Kong which has a coordinated light show of all the building lights in Central. Pretty spectacular to watch from Kowloon side,
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That’s cool! I’d be interested to hear any details about the file format of that content. You can’t map rectangular content to a sphere, so what are they doing there? Did they have to build their own video tools to do Mercator projections or some such?
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The sooner the better.
He said their own video tools, and they “spread” the 360 in screens “flat” for mapping and explaining to clients. They can do transferring from 2D to 360 very smoothly.
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Cool. Sounds like a tool chain I’d like to see. That’s one of those graphics problems that is way more interesting (and harder) than most people realize.
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I’m hoping for progress soon, because the fisheye effect on curved monitors is a real bummer sometimes. It’d be nice if the rendered image was a projection onto the actual geometry of the monitor (I’m probably not using technically correct words here)
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Just thinking about it gives me a headache.
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They’re pretty bright LEDs. Even if we assume just a quarter watt each, that’s still 250kW for a million LEDs.
It’s not insanely huge, though it’s not nothing.
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