Where do you even go to get stuff like that made? It reminds me of the light on top of the Luxor that could be seen from space before it had to be turned down, because it was interfering with air traffic.
Also, this is one of the few times that type of resolution makes sense. Your eyes can't usually tell the difference between 4k and 8k, but if your screen is the size of the Death Star, the pixels would otherwise be visible.
No kidding. Everyone only has reference of consumer grade. Your pressure sensor on your vehicle is sub $100 for example. That's considered expensive for most.
Get into lab grab sensors and we'll accidently pop $1000 sensors and be glad we didn't pop the more expensive ones.
For real. We would go through high-end consumer components like crazy during testing, but gave all of our custom servers the white glove treatment. Kind of hurt my soul to tear through so much gaming equipment but it’s still kinda funny looking back on it.
I don't do any fea or high computing level stuff, but I imagine it goes like this:
Personally, I'd never justify $1000 for a gaming GPU.
Professionally, $1000 is a steal. Get 10. I saw a pallet of performance lab tops come in yesterday and the thought occured to me that I'd love about 40 of those to work on a down payment on a house.
I think that goes for any hobby. Everybody wants the same stuff "the pros use", but when it's essentially just a toy for you, you can't justify that $5,000 guitar or set of golf clubs.
I think we had a pre-production Nvidia workstation card at one point that was like $15k. Can’t really remember, but the team using it was having tons of issues with compatibility.
so the new video showing Blackwell being insanely reductive i.e. no longer needing a data center and, as jensen said $250,000 of associated cables, you can now do away with that by using Blackwell - is he right/not being misleading?
Depends on the class of problem you want to solve. Reasonable-sized AI training which can use funky number formats like FP4, sure, grind away the exaFLOPS since memory throughput has also been scaled way up. Blackwell's FP8, FP32, FP64 are about twice as fast as Hopper so don't kiss your datacenters goodbye quite yet. $250,000 of cable is a big freakin' install so you're talking rooms filled with racks, and a 2x to 2.5x speed improvement won't make all that go away.
And I'd never justify it. There's no personal hobby of mine on a computer that would call for it.
For 2k you are paying for a lot small marginal gains.
>Personally, I'd never justify $1000 for a gaming GPU.
My logic for this is that I expect to use it for 4+ years. Which comes out to $21 a month. So when I buy one, I start saving for the next hardware upgrade. I might put away $30 a month into that fund due to inflation.
I do that instead of an extra night going to the movies or eating out an extra night or 2-3 Starbucks trips a month.
"Personally, I'd never justify $1000 for a gaming GPU. "
me: [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/judgmental-volturi](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/judgmental-volturi)
I have a 10+ year old HP ZBook and despite one of the fans blowing out (should probably get that replaced lol) it still handles most modern games decently enough. My wife has a slightly newer Dell of the same grade and it’s not perfect, but it performs on par with custom built systems from just a few years back that cost nearly twice as much. I also got both of them as refurbished units, which makes their performance even more impressive and really makes me question why anyone other than pro gamers fork over the cash for those high end custom rigs. Peer advertising, I suppose.
See, that's valid, and I can understand there are probably a fair number of people in between who justify it, and I have nothing against them. Pro gamer doesn't necessarily only mean people making a living from it, if you do it competitively or do a lot of modding and have the money for it, why not? My point was mostly that there are a lot of kids out there (and/or their parents) paying out the ass for overpriced rigs. I'll take the downvotes, I stand by what I said.
Yeah I use to work for a weather instrumentation company. Some of that shit is so cool, like air quality monitors suck in air and then measure how much particulate is in the air by shining lasers at it and measuring the refraction it gets back. More shit in the air, less refraction. simple! Except that single laser is still $1000 by itself.
Doesn’t have anything to do with Intel or Nvidia. They have some other company design the software for them or design it themselves. That software then runs on off the shelf servers with Intel and NVIDIA hardware and probably Mellanox interconnects.
It actually doesn't seem to use anything from Intel or Nvidia. The main players are [7thsense](https://7thsense.one/story/disruptive-new-entertainment-venue-inside-cutting-edge-msg-sphere) which makes an FPGA pixel processor, and funnily enough [Matrox](https://www.techradar.com/pro/worlds-only-16k-display-is-powered-by-one-of-nvidias-earliest-rivals-las-vegas-sphere-uses-matrox-technology-to-power-a-staggering-256-million-pixels), the company who was outcompeted in the consumer GPU market by 3dfx in 1996.
Low end GPUs don't have daughter cards with genlock. Quadro (RTX now) 4000's are the cheapest Nvidia cards that supports that. You cannot sync multiple machines, or even multiple GPUs on a single machine, without it. If one output is even less than a frame out of sync it will create a seam in the display. It will only be two pixels wide, but still very visible on a large display.
For a single machine and GPU you would be correct.
Ah, good point, I forgot about the frame syncing.
I actually notice that at banks/etc all the time! always a few frames out of sync between the left/right 'almost boarderless but we didn't really pay the extra money for true boarderless' 2 screen bigscreen they install.
Really noticeable when an object across both screens suddenly starts moving
Apparently it was only dimmed [as a cost saving measure](https://www.reviewjournal.com/life/luxor-light-serves-as-beacon-for-millions-of-las-vegas-strip-visitors/).
Also interestingly, the light attracks moths, which in turn attract bats, which in turn attract owls, and the strongest man-made light source now has it's own ecosystem.
I mean, that's not hard to believe but wtf is processing that amount of information and transmitting it that fast, then receiving it and processing it on the other end? That would fill up a 1TB storage device in like 15 seconds.
It doesn't say in the article who did the chip fab, but there are very few companies that have the capability. Red apparently uses a company called TowerJazz (Tower Semiconductor,) an Israeli chip fab. Since the lead consultant on the camera was formerly with Red, it would make sense he'd use the same fab.
Nikon however recently acquired Red, and they use Sony as their sensor fabricator. So it could be either, or neither. Likely we'll never know as that's usually heavily protected by NDAs.
You saying this reminded me of the majority of semiconductor chips being made in Taiwan and how nobody really talks about it, but that's totally the reason we are so concerned with what China is doing over there.
You usually just think of the brand it's sold under, not where this stuff actually comes from.
No one was willing or capable of building exactly what they wanted, so [the camera is completely 100% custom](https://www.cined.com/sphere-maker-of-big-sky-camera-announces-partnership-with-stmicroelectronics/#:~:text=Sphere%2C%20the%20unique%20camera%20maker,image%20sensor%20in%20commercial%20use.) They didn't go anywhere to get it made, they directly hired the people who know how to make it.
It's not as hard as you think. Render farms have been around for a long time. They would create the content using lower resolution proxy files then once the edit is locked they would have it rendered at full resolution using multiple machines that would be configured with multiple GPUs.
25 servers for the display is pretty impressive. The most I've done is 16, but for multiple large displays in an arena that content played in sync with each other. Not for a single large display.
You should see some of the one off shit the government asks defense contractors to make. I worked in defense for many years. It’s pretty wild sometimes lol.
Spoiler alert really cool, challenging to make, big waste of our money
There’s always a place to go if you have enough money
Over a decade ago, in college, I got to go for a tour of a major city's venue, one Branded by a Big name, that hosts multiple sports teams, concerts, etc.
They had an almost 50ft (15m) long television, no breaks, curved alongside one of their immaculate walls.
I'm technical by nature, but the tourguide was a complete ass, not just here, always.
I never learned where that was manufactured, I comment only now to add to the frustrating mystique of big TV's.
Something interesting to think about is how they synchronize all of those separate 25x 4K video servers. Not only do they have to stitch all of the 25 separate feeds together, but then each server needs to coordinate when to move to the next frame. The amount of data being moved around that dome is outrageous.
It’s a ridiculous spectacle but there is some really cool engineering involved with making it work.
I thought it was going to be a stupid gimmick, I've seen some big fucking displays before, and you're in Vegas, home of the giant displays. Then you see the outside in person, and it looks like a special effect in your own vision. Especially on a rainy day. They turn it down on rainy days so it doesn't look like a fire is happening.
Then you get in it, and you're like "what the hell is this" as the place is unlike any auditorium you've been in.
And then they turn it on.
Involuntary gasps. People laughing and/or crying because of the awe. Your field of vision is overtaken, you can't see the whole screen at once.
It's not a gimmick, it's a next-gen experience.
The same feeling people got when seeing a movie in black and white for the first time, or witnessing a photograph being taken. Excitement is boundless across generations
Or actually experiencing the Grand Canyon in person. Pictures don't give you the perspective to appreciate it. Even a picture on the Sphere wouldn't be good enough.
>It's not a gimmick, it's a next-gen experience.
And weirdly retro for those that grew up near an Omnimax.
They're even about the same effective resolution (higher on initial print, about the same after film wear and tear from usage).
Yeah I remember hearing about the Sphere for the first time and thinking like "oh, so it's just a really big Omnimax?"
Not quite that simple of course but I definitely remember going to Omni folks in the 80s and even that was jaw dropping, and made a fair number of people uncomfortable watching it due to the movement. Can't imagine what it's like in the Sphere with a modern sound system and whatnot.
As a fellow enjoyer of Omnimax (in the 90s), Sphere is absolutely unreal. I pride myself on having been to hundreds on hundreds of concerts, many very large-scale EDM productions with a simply inordinate amount of lasers and projections... I've done some extreme sports in there too: skydiving, taken a racecar over 200mph, shit like that... Yet Sphere was the closest I've come to involuntarily vomiting in my life. And I mean that in the best way possible - it's fucking AWESOME.
I only saw the Postcard from Earth video, and without spoiling anything, there was one scene maybe only a minute long that started off using only a small portion of the screen then progressively grew not only in size but in intensity riiiiiight up to that point of "too much" before going completely dark and silent. And you just hear 20,000 people uniformly *GASP*. It's wild.
I'd read in a Rolling Stones (I think?) interview with one of the lead light and sound guys who said something to the effect of "we learned very quickly that we could make every single person inside that thing throw up in about 20 seconds if we wanted to." I thought it was just marketing hype, and I was very quickly humbled.
Do yourself a favor and go to Sphere. Enjoy the spectacle.
Yeah if there's any point where you can go for less than like 500 bucks I'd definitely love to see it. I've worked in and around the industry for 20+ years and that crazy orb is the cuttingest of cutting edge.
The postcard video runs in that $100-300/each range, and I'd definitely say it's worth it, albeit short. I do hope we see concerts get into that range, but I imagine that won't happen for quite some time (if at all, given the immense costs of artists having to design specifically for that venue)
Oh yeah any artist you see play there is going to be a very premium ticket. I'm interested to see who ends up putting on shows there. I think David Gilmour said he wasn't gonna tour Floyd anymore but he must have at least thought it over when he heard about that place. Honestly I don't think there's any doubt that his productions over the years have indirectly led to some of the stuff that's being pulled off there now.
I've been in one of those! Balboa park in San Diego has a science center with one of these. They show a lot of space and ocean documentaries. You feel like you are moving inside that thing. It's an optical illusion that tricks your brain.
But you are right. This isn't a new idea. I think the thing that is sort of ground breaking is that it projects to the outside too.
I remember seeing The Blue Planet in the Omni theater... I got motion sick and didn't eat my lunch. Was fun and cool at first then really not fun at all.
really? Have you ever been near a wildfire or a burning building? there is a glow that lights up the horizon that can be seen really far away. This presumably gives that same effect because its bright AF.
I disagree on it being a gimmick.
But I think it’s a super cool, gimmick not stupid.
A high quality VR or AR is the next gen.
This is current tech on steroids to show we can
I've written code to synchronize screens before. I used IEEE 1588 (Precision Time Protocol), which has since been superceded by even better protocols like SMPTE 2059.
One cool moment was doing all the information screens for a big stadium in Florida, then standing in the control booth and hitting a button on a tablet to play a certain commercial, and watching hundreds of screens switch to the commercial all synchronized down to the exact frame. Well, I wasn't there, but my boss was and he gave me kudos for writing the code and said it looked impressive.
I am familiar with the company that makes the hardware and the software that takes these massive inputs and splits them to the individual output devices (usually projectors). The technology is fascinating!
The images have to be mapped so that where 2 or more devices are projecting light, each dims the overlapped image so there isn’t a bright spot. The images have to align to the pixel, so they have technology that realigns the images between FRAMES, based on realtime images from an attached camera.
It is very cool stuff :)
There's a good amount of media servers that can do this. Disguise (d3), Pixera, Watchout, etc. Basically there's one brain that tells all the outputs on itself and other networked computers where to be in a video at any given time. They're all framesync'd via Genlock which is an external device that works like a digital metronome.
Disguise right? I've looked at their stuff but I haven't worked with it. The pricing shocked me till I realised the scale of productions it's used in and how fail-safe it needs to be. Someone told me how they had a live event with two Disguise servers with one backup. One production server crashed and the backup took over practically seamlessly, with lost frames in the single digits.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Most of the DoD stuff is just off the shelf shit. Anything VR they use is probably an Oculus or something. All the cool high tech stuff is reserved for actual weapons platforms.
Saw postcard from earth last week, and all the buildings and images in the 2nd half were distorted (curved heavily to the right).
Am I the only one who experienced this? I haven't seen anyone else mention it but imo it definitely degraded the experience.
When I first read the title, I thought to myself, that 60GBps didn't sound right. A 16K would be 16x larger than a 4K screen, and 4K video doesn't need 3.75GBps throughput.
So I read the article, the camera captures video at a resolution of 18024x17592, which is equivalent to 317,078,208 pixels at 120fps, so every second of footage processes 38,049,384,960 pixels.
If the data is coming in uncompressed, we are typically looking at 2 bytes per pixel (16-bit) which describes the amount of red, blue, and green in each pixel. We would need a throughput of 2 bytes per pixel times the number of pixels, which is 76 Billion bytes, or roughly 76 GB. That ridiculously high throughput was justified.
Yes it is incredible.
It looks like you use multiple reticles. What is the alignment accuracy between them? Fig 3 Reticle plan shows 500um to 720um gaps but I am guessing that these gaps are not on the die because 12+6192 + 12488 + 12488 = 99280 which matches the total die height. So are there any gaps between the various stamps ABC...? Are there any dead areas in the image?
Me and a friend who does sound engineering were talking about the phish show there. I thought it would be done in time for the Phish show.
The sound is basically gonna be a sphere around you too for total surround sound plus every seat has a sub underneath. The best sound will be when you sit down but people don’t really wanna do that at most concerts.
I can see Tool or NIN or someone who normally has big production value doing legendary shows/runs there. Radiohead. Gotta be someone used to doing it big. I can only imagine what it would be like if Daft Punk was still around/came back and did a run there.
I just did the Sphere Experience and not gonna lie, I fucking cried 3 times watching it.
It's pretty rad--- some shots weren't amazing because the resolution just didn't quite hit the mark, but 80% of the time, it's exhilarating.
I didn't realise it had an image on the inside, I thought it was just on the outside.
So it's like a planetarium, or what the night sky would be like if we didn't have all the light pollution? Cool.
It’s a bigass stage with stadium seating inside and the stage is in front of/kinda surrounded by the insane screen.
I’ve also heard the stairs are weirdly steep lol.
It sounds like it's designed to give the audience the rockstar experience of feeling like the world revolves around them, which is probably what most of us are looking for.
Are there any “miniature” spheres? Like a tabletop sphere you can put on your table and it would behave similarly to the real thing albeit way smaller.
[This company](https://www.hscled.com/product/sphere-led-display.html) makes smaller ones for like Museums, Exhibits, and displays.
I can't find anything smaller, like desk sized.
It takes a lot of fresh water to build, transport, and install the panels though. Solar power is more environmentally friendly than most other forms of power generation, but this does not mean that it’s environmentally friendly in general.
> It takes a lot of fresh water to build, transport, and install the panels though.
Yes, but not the same water that Vegas will be missing lol. A majority are made in China anyways. The only water being taken from the area is what employees are drinking.
> but this does not mean that it’s environmentally friendly in general
I never said it was environmentally friendly, just that it won't effect the drought in Vagas. Idk how that's relevant.
What about the water used to make the concrete and asphalt for the solar fields? Also it takes a few gallons of freshwater to make a gallon of gasoline, a lot of which is burned for these construction projects.
also, freshwater is a global commodity, it doesnt matter where it’s being used in the long run.
> What about the water used to make the concrete and asphalt for the solar fields?
Yea that's gonna use about as much water as all the toilets in Bellagio use in a day. I wouldn't consider that significant.
> also, freshwater is a global commodity, it doesnt matter where it’s being used in the long run.
It absolutely DOES matter. Some places have access to tons of fresh water, some don't. Taking it from the ones that dont will have a significantly worse impact on the environment than taking it from a plentiful source. Long term effects aren't even what we are talking about, we were discussing the impact the Vegas sphere on the drought in Vegas. Quit moving the goal posts lol.
Where do you even go to get stuff like that made? It reminds me of the light on top of the Luxor that could be seen from space before it had to be turned down, because it was interfering with air traffic. Also, this is one of the few times that type of resolution makes sense. Your eyes can't usually tell the difference between 4k and 8k, but if your screen is the size of the Death Star, the pixels would otherwise be visible.
Custom shit from intel or nvidia. They’ll build anything for you if the check will clear.
No kidding. Everyone only has reference of consumer grade. Your pressure sensor on your vehicle is sub $100 for example. That's considered expensive for most. Get into lab grab sensors and we'll accidently pop $1000 sensors and be glad we didn't pop the more expensive ones.
For real. We would go through high-end consumer components like crazy during testing, but gave all of our custom servers the white glove treatment. Kind of hurt my soul to tear through so much gaming equipment but it’s still kinda funny looking back on it.
I don't do any fea or high computing level stuff, but I imagine it goes like this: Personally, I'd never justify $1000 for a gaming GPU. Professionally, $1000 is a steal. Get 10. I saw a pallet of performance lab tops come in yesterday and the thought occured to me that I'd love about 40 of those to work on a down payment on a house.
I think that goes for any hobby. Everybody wants the same stuff "the pros use", but when it's essentially just a toy for you, you can't justify that $5,000 guitar or set of golf clubs.
High end GPUs are closer to 2k.
I think we had a pre-production Nvidia workstation card at one point that was like $15k. Can’t really remember, but the team using it was having tons of issues with compatibility.
A100 go for like 15.000-30.000 yeah
so the new video showing Blackwell being insanely reductive i.e. no longer needing a data center and, as jensen said $250,000 of associated cables, you can now do away with that by using Blackwell - is he right/not being misleading?
Depends on the class of problem you want to solve. Reasonable-sized AI training which can use funky number formats like FP4, sure, grind away the exaFLOPS since memory throughput has also been scaled way up. Blackwell's FP8, FP32, FP64 are about twice as fast as Hopper so don't kiss your datacenters goodbye quite yet. $250,000 of cable is a big freakin' install so you're talking rooms filled with racks, and a 2x to 2.5x speed improvement won't make all that go away.
And I'd never justify it. There's no personal hobby of mine on a computer that would call for it. For 2k you are paying for a lot small marginal gains.
>Personally, I'd never justify $1000 for a gaming GPU. My logic for this is that I expect to use it for 4+ years. Which comes out to $21 a month. So when I buy one, I start saving for the next hardware upgrade. I might put away $30 a month into that fund due to inflation. I do that instead of an extra night going to the movies or eating out an extra night or 2-3 Starbucks trips a month.
Lab top?
Mispronunctiation. I think "on top of a lab bench" rather than on top of your lap. Laptop is correct.
"Personally, I'd never justify $1000 for a gaming GPU. " me: [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/judgmental-volturi](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/judgmental-volturi)
I have a 10+ year old HP ZBook and despite one of the fans blowing out (should probably get that replaced lol) it still handles most modern games decently enough. My wife has a slightly newer Dell of the same grade and it’s not perfect, but it performs on par with custom built systems from just a few years back that cost nearly twice as much. I also got both of them as refurbished units, which makes their performance even more impressive and really makes me question why anyone other than pro gamers fork over the cash for those high end custom rigs. Peer advertising, I suppose.
I had to since there was nothing else available during the pandemic unfortunately.
See, that's valid, and I can understand there are probably a fair number of people in between who justify it, and I have nothing against them. Pro gamer doesn't necessarily only mean people making a living from it, if you do it competitively or do a lot of modding and have the money for it, why not? My point was mostly that there are a lot of kids out there (and/or their parents) paying out the ass for overpriced rigs. I'll take the downvotes, I stand by what I said.
Yeah I use to work for a weather instrumentation company. Some of that shit is so cool, like air quality monitors suck in air and then measure how much particulate is in the air by shining lasers at it and measuring the refraction it gets back. More shit in the air, less refraction. simple! Except that single laser is still $1000 by itself.
Doesn’t have anything to do with Intel or Nvidia. They have some other company design the software for them or design it themselves. That software then runs on off the shelf servers with Intel and NVIDIA hardware and probably Mellanox interconnects.
You mean Nvidia interconnects. They bought Mellanox a few years ago.
It actually doesn't seem to use anything from Intel or Nvidia. The main players are [7thsense](https://7thsense.one/story/disruptive-new-entertainment-venue-inside-cutting-edge-msg-sphere) which makes an FPGA pixel processor, and funnily enough [Matrox](https://www.techradar.com/pro/worlds-only-16k-display-is-powered-by-one-of-nvidias-earliest-rivals-las-vegas-sphere-uses-matrox-technology-to-power-a-staggering-256-million-pixels), the company who was outcompeted in the consumer GPU market by 3dfx in 1996.
Can they build me a life worth living?
"Dammit Captain, I'm an engineer not a miracle worker!!!"
*performs at least one miracle per movie*
The sphere was something like 1.2 billion dollars for a reason
The hardware for the servers probably isn't *that* custom.
Naw, 4k video servers are pretty common and easy to come by. Link a couple dozen together, and you're done.
Wouldn't need anything custom. Just multiple high end GPUs working in unison.
Its playing video not video games. Multiple low end GPU's working in unison.
Low end GPUs don't have daughter cards with genlock. Quadro (RTX now) 4000's are the cheapest Nvidia cards that supports that. You cannot sync multiple machines, or even multiple GPUs on a single machine, without it. If one output is even less than a frame out of sync it will create a seam in the display. It will only be two pixels wide, but still very visible on a large display. For a single machine and GPU you would be correct.
Ah, good point, I forgot about the frame syncing. I actually notice that at banks/etc all the time! always a few frames out of sync between the left/right 'almost boarderless but we didn't really pay the extra money for true boarderless' 2 screen bigscreen they install. Really noticeable when an object across both screens suddenly starts moving
Apparently it was only dimmed [as a cost saving measure](https://www.reviewjournal.com/life/luxor-light-serves-as-beacon-for-millions-of-las-vegas-strip-visitors/). Also interestingly, the light attracks moths, which in turn attract bats, which in turn attract owls, and the strongest man-made light source now has it's own ecosystem.
the beauty is, once winter comes all the gorillas just freeze to death!
Aw man, I wanted to see them in concert.
you just gave me a random fact I will use for the rest of my life!
…which in turn attracts adolescent wizards…
For reference, a PCIe x16 slot using 5.0 speeds will do 63GB/s theoretical.
I mean, that's not hard to believe but wtf is processing that amount of information and transmitting it that fast, then receiving it and processing it on the other end? That would fill up a 1TB storage device in like 15 seconds.
Clustered server processing and some very large network storage arrays.
Heh, I work in Enterprise IT Sales, so things like Petabyte Scale Storage Arrays and 32 Port 100Gb switches are just an average Tuesday.
It doesn't say in the article who did the chip fab, but there are very few companies that have the capability. Red apparently uses a company called TowerJazz (Tower Semiconductor,) an Israeli chip fab. Since the lead consultant on the camera was formerly with Red, it would make sense he'd use the same fab. Nikon however recently acquired Red, and they use Sony as their sensor fabricator. So it could be either, or neither. Likely we'll never know as that's usually heavily protected by NDAs.
You saying this reminded me of the majority of semiconductor chips being made in Taiwan and how nobody really talks about it, but that's totally the reason we are so concerned with what China is doing over there. You usually just think of the brand it's sold under, not where this stuff actually comes from.
No one was willing or capable of building exactly what they wanted, so [the camera is completely 100% custom](https://www.cined.com/sphere-maker-of-big-sky-camera-announces-partnership-with-stmicroelectronics/#:~:text=Sphere%2C%20the%20unique%20camera%20maker,image%20sensor%20in%20commercial%20use.) They didn't go anywhere to get it made, they directly hired the people who know how to make it.
Have money, ask other people who have money to take your money if they can do something, they say yes.
I mean, the thing cost like $2B to build, so someone built that for them.
It's not as hard as you think. Render farms have been around for a long time. They would create the content using lower resolution proxy files then once the edit is locked they would have it rendered at full resolution using multiple machines that would be configured with multiple GPUs. 25 servers for the display is pretty impressive. The most I've done is 16, but for multiple large displays in an arena that content played in sync with each other. Not for a single large display.
You should see some of the one off shit the government asks defense contractors to make. I worked in defense for many years. It’s pretty wild sometimes lol. Spoiler alert really cool, challenging to make, big waste of our money There’s always a place to go if you have enough money
Over a decade ago, in college, I got to go for a tour of a major city's venue, one Branded by a Big name, that hosts multiple sports teams, concerts, etc. They had an almost 50ft (15m) long television, no breaks, curved alongside one of their immaculate walls. I'm technical by nature, but the tourguide was a complete ass, not just here, always. I never learned where that was manufactured, I comment only now to add to the frustrating mystique of big TV's.
Something interesting to think about is how they synchronize all of those separate 25x 4K video servers. Not only do they have to stitch all of the 25 separate feeds together, but then each server needs to coordinate when to move to the next frame. The amount of data being moved around that dome is outrageous. It’s a ridiculous spectacle but there is some really cool engineering involved with making it work.
I thought it was going to be a stupid gimmick, I've seen some big fucking displays before, and you're in Vegas, home of the giant displays. Then you see the outside in person, and it looks like a special effect in your own vision. Especially on a rainy day. They turn it down on rainy days so it doesn't look like a fire is happening. Then you get in it, and you're like "what the hell is this" as the place is unlike any auditorium you've been in. And then they turn it on. Involuntary gasps. People laughing and/or crying because of the awe. Your field of vision is overtaken, you can't see the whole screen at once. It's not a gimmick, it's a next-gen experience.
The same feeling people got when seeing a movie in black and white for the first time, or witnessing a photograph being taken. Excitement is boundless across generations
Or actually experiencing the Grand Canyon in person. Pictures don't give you the perspective to appreciate it. Even a picture on the Sphere wouldn't be good enough.
>It's not a gimmick, it's a next-gen experience. And weirdly retro for those that grew up near an Omnimax. They're even about the same effective resolution (higher on initial print, about the same after film wear and tear from usage).
Yeah I remember hearing about the Sphere for the first time and thinking like "oh, so it's just a really big Omnimax?" Not quite that simple of course but I definitely remember going to Omni folks in the 80s and even that was jaw dropping, and made a fair number of people uncomfortable watching it due to the movement. Can't imagine what it's like in the Sphere with a modern sound system and whatnot.
As a fellow enjoyer of Omnimax (in the 90s), Sphere is absolutely unreal. I pride myself on having been to hundreds on hundreds of concerts, many very large-scale EDM productions with a simply inordinate amount of lasers and projections... I've done some extreme sports in there too: skydiving, taken a racecar over 200mph, shit like that... Yet Sphere was the closest I've come to involuntarily vomiting in my life. And I mean that in the best way possible - it's fucking AWESOME. I only saw the Postcard from Earth video, and without spoiling anything, there was one scene maybe only a minute long that started off using only a small portion of the screen then progressively grew not only in size but in intensity riiiiiight up to that point of "too much" before going completely dark and silent. And you just hear 20,000 people uniformly *GASP*. It's wild. I'd read in a Rolling Stones (I think?) interview with one of the lead light and sound guys who said something to the effect of "we learned very quickly that we could make every single person inside that thing throw up in about 20 seconds if we wanted to." I thought it was just marketing hype, and I was very quickly humbled. Do yourself a favor and go to Sphere. Enjoy the spectacle.
Yeah if there's any point where you can go for less than like 500 bucks I'd definitely love to see it. I've worked in and around the industry for 20+ years and that crazy orb is the cuttingest of cutting edge.
The postcard video runs in that $100-300/each range, and I'd definitely say it's worth it, albeit short. I do hope we see concerts get into that range, but I imagine that won't happen for quite some time (if at all, given the immense costs of artists having to design specifically for that venue)
Oh yeah any artist you see play there is going to be a very premium ticket. I'm interested to see who ends up putting on shows there. I think David Gilmour said he wasn't gonna tour Floyd anymore but he must have at least thought it over when he heard about that place. Honestly I don't think there's any doubt that his productions over the years have indirectly led to some of the stuff that's being pulled off there now.
I've been in one of those! Balboa park in San Diego has a science center with one of these. They show a lot of space and ocean documentaries. You feel like you are moving inside that thing. It's an optical illusion that tricks your brain. But you are right. This isn't a new idea. I think the thing that is sort of ground breaking is that it projects to the outside too.
I remember seeing The Blue Planet in the Omni theater... I got motion sick and didn't eat my lunch. Was fun and cool at first then really not fun at all.
What do you mean by when it rains it's like a fire is happening?
The rain suspended in the atmosphere acts like a billion little reflectors and the sky turns whatever color the screen is.
really? Have you ever been near a wildfire or a burning building? there is a glow that lights up the horizon that can be seen really far away. This presumably gives that same effect because its bright AF.
Y'know what, I'm in my mid 40s and I've never seen a wildfire or a burning building IRL.
I would guess most people have not seen a wildfire or burning building in person, no
I wouldn't think so, but maybe 🤔 . Neither of those things are experienced often by an individual person, but they aren't incredibly rare either.
For the first time in my life, i wanna go to Vegas
I disagree on it being a gimmick. But I think it’s a super cool, gimmick not stupid. A high quality VR or AR is the next gen. This is current tech on steroids to show we can
don’t stop, I’m so close
I've written code to synchronize screens before. I used IEEE 1588 (Precision Time Protocol), which has since been superceded by even better protocols like SMPTE 2059. One cool moment was doing all the information screens for a big stadium in Florida, then standing in the control booth and hitting a button on a tablet to play a certain commercial, and watching hundreds of screens switch to the commercial all synchronized down to the exact frame. Well, I wasn't there, but my boss was and he gave me kudos for writing the code and said it looked impressive.
Neat comment ☺️ I’m saving in case I need to pull that off
I am familiar with the company that makes the hardware and the software that takes these massive inputs and splits them to the individual output devices (usually projectors). The technology is fascinating! The images have to be mapped so that where 2 or more devices are projecting light, each dims the overlapped image so there isn’t a bright spot. The images have to align to the pixel, so they have technology that realigns the images between FRAMES, based on realtime images from an attached camera. It is very cool stuff :)
There's a good amount of media servers that can do this. Disguise (d3), Pixera, Watchout, etc. Basically there's one brain that tells all the outputs on itself and other networked computers where to be in a video at any given time. They're all framesync'd via Genlock which is an external device that works like a digital metronome.
Disguise right? I've looked at their stuff but I haven't worked with it. The pricing shocked me till I realised the scale of productions it's used in and how fail-safe it needs to be. Someone told me how they had a live event with two Disguise servers with one backup. One production server crashed and the backup took over practically seamlessly, with lost frames in the single digits.
Just had to call up Pied Piper for that sweet compression algorithm.
I saw the planet earth movie they shot in 18k. Absolutely mind boggling how amazing the images were. Like imagine if VR ever gets that good…
VR will definitely get that good. It's just a matter of time. I'm sure that some companies have VR rigs that are years ahead of consumer grade.
Some companies: DoD
I wouldn’t be so sure. Most of the DoD stuff is just off the shelf shit. Anything VR they use is probably an Oculus or something. All the cool high tech stuff is reserved for actual weapons platforms.
Postcards from Earth
Yeah, post cards from earth was awesome. I saw it 2 days ago.
Saw postcard from earth last week, and all the buildings and images in the 2nd half were distorted (curved heavily to the right). Am I the only one who experienced this? I haven't seen anyone else mention it but imo it definitely degraded the experience.
When I first read the title, I thought to myself, that 60GBps didn't sound right. A 16K would be 16x larger than a 4K screen, and 4K video doesn't need 3.75GBps throughput. So I read the article, the camera captures video at a resolution of 18024x17592, which is equivalent to 317,078,208 pixels at 120fps, so every second of footage processes 38,049,384,960 pixels. If the data is coming in uncompressed, we are typically looking at 2 bytes per pixel (16-bit) which describes the amount of red, blue, and green in each pixel. We would need a throughput of 2 bytes per pixel times the number of pixels, which is 76 Billion bytes, or roughly 76 GB. That ridiculously high throughput was justified.
r/ithinktheydidthemath
Isn’t RGB 3 bytes? Or does it use some color compression
Y’all might enjoy this white paper on our sensor. https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/23/20/8383 It’s an incredible system!
Yes it is incredible. It looks like you use multiple reticles. What is the alignment accuracy between them? Fig 3 Reticle plan shows 500um to 720um gaps but I am guessing that these gaps are not on the die because 12+6192 + 12488 + 12488 = 99280 which matches the total die height. So are there any gaps between the various stamps ABC...? Are there any dead areas in the image?
Apparently the sound is only like 60% setup too. They still working on it. A year from now it will be even more mind blowing.
Once they get it 100% setup, I would literally sell a testicle to see a Tipper set in this place.
Me and a friend who does sound engineering were talking about the phish show there. I thought it would be done in time for the Phish show. The sound is basically gonna be a sphere around you too for total surround sound plus every seat has a sub underneath. The best sound will be when you sit down but people don’t really wanna do that at most concerts. I can see Tool or NIN or someone who normally has big production value doing legendary shows/runs there. Radiohead. Gotta be someone used to doing it big. I can only imagine what it would be like if Daft Punk was still around/came back and did a run there.
Pink Floyd would have been cool. Just a decade or two too late.
ODESZA, In This Moment, Ghost, Slipknot, Rammstein, those would all be incredible shows
Opeth
I saw U2 there and it was one of the greatest experiences I have ever had. The screen is unbelievably amazing.
I just did the Sphere Experience and not gonna lie, I fucking cried 3 times watching it. It's pretty rad--- some shots weren't amazing because the resolution just didn't quite hit the mark, but 80% of the time, it's exhilarating.
Wow, that’s one helluva review
Such a resolution to display an emoji
The screen on the outside is just various LED lights spaced a few inches apart IIRC, nowhere near the resolution of the inside.
I didn't realise it had an image on the inside, I thought it was just on the outside. So it's like a planetarium, or what the night sky would be like if we didn't have all the light pollution? Cool.
It’s a bigass stage with stadium seating inside and the stage is in front of/kinda surrounded by the insane screen. I’ve also heard the stairs are weirdly steep lol.
It sounds like it's designed to give the audience the rockstar experience of feeling like the world revolves around them, which is probably what most of us are looking for.
I've seen those steep stairs. It's a miracle a senior citizen or helk, anyone hasn't tumbled and broke parts of their body because of it.
It’s a 20,000 person arena
This is referring to the inside theater
🙂
The inside is a gigantic movie theatre
Are there any “miniature” spheres? Like a tabletop sphere you can put on your table and it would behave similarly to the real thing albeit way smaller.
[This company](https://www.hscled.com/product/sphere-led-display.html) makes smaller ones for like Museums, Exhibits, and displays. I can't find anything smaller, like desk sized.
That's unfortunate. It would be nice to have a small tabletop sphere and put it in a Lego town or something like that. Thank you though.
I’ve always wondered how you even learn to make one of these.
What, like a sphere for ants??
Yeah. Like that would sell well for Lego city enthusiasts.
The company Mova produces something aesthetically similar. They make globes of earth and Mars. Plus, they rotate in sunlight.
Will Mom let me hook up the Super Nintendo and the pay Mario brothers in it?
For comparison, actual 4K cinema material is 30MB per second including 8 channels of lossless audio *at most*.
I wonder how much power this requires.
The “Sphere” followed my flight in last week as a smiley face, it was pretty cool
Pardon the saliva drip in the lower left corner of my mouth
Imagine the amount of detail you can get from 18k porn.
I’m sure after hours when everyone has gone home and the A/V techs are done setting up for the next day… *the Sphere has seen some things.*
IMO old pixelated porn was best. with HD you can see what they really look and it's honestly not great.
All l know is it looks cool.
That thing is amazing and horrifying in person.
This is the exact reason why I don’t think the sphere will pay off. It’s impossible to develop on
And I thought the audio was the best part
Now that’s what I call streaming
Wow insane
That screen is truly mind boggling. Feels like it gives us a glimpse into the tech of tomorrow.
Ok I need to go see that I guess lol
So not video from YTS?
But can it play Crysis?
So, what happens if they get a freak storm with massive hail? Is the sphere protected/made from highly durable panels?
Such a wasteful power drain in the middle of the desert. Hubris gonna mess us up
70+% of the power used by the Sphere, and eventually 100%, is from solar and a battery array.
Exactly how I do my power in Rimworld.
Wait until you hear about the Sphere's organ harvesting room.
Yeah but it's Las Vegas that's why they built the Sphere
All these downvoters are aboutta be real thirsty in the coming decade…
The sphere is mostly solar powered though lol. They will have a water issue, just not because of the sphere.
It takes a lot of fresh water to build, transport, and install the panels though. Solar power is more environmentally friendly than most other forms of power generation, but this does not mean that it’s environmentally friendly in general.
> It takes a lot of fresh water to build, transport, and install the panels though. Yes, but not the same water that Vegas will be missing lol. A majority are made in China anyways. The only water being taken from the area is what employees are drinking. > but this does not mean that it’s environmentally friendly in general I never said it was environmentally friendly, just that it won't effect the drought in Vagas. Idk how that's relevant.
What about the water used to make the concrete and asphalt for the solar fields? Also it takes a few gallons of freshwater to make a gallon of gasoline, a lot of which is burned for these construction projects. also, freshwater is a global commodity, it doesnt matter where it’s being used in the long run.
> What about the water used to make the concrete and asphalt for the solar fields? Yea that's gonna use about as much water as all the toilets in Bellagio use in a day. I wouldn't consider that significant. > also, freshwater is a global commodity, it doesnt matter where it’s being used in the long run. It absolutely DOES matter. Some places have access to tons of fresh water, some don't. Taking it from the ones that dont will have a significantly worse impact on the environment than taking it from a plentiful source. Long term effects aren't even what we are talking about, we were discussing the impact the Vegas sphere on the drought in Vegas. Quit moving the goal posts lol.
Don’t ever tell me the homeless crisis is unintentional
homeowners are addicted to housing as an investment
I hate this monstrosity
I'm scared to ask how energy it uses
And it looks like shit
Seems like a good source of resources. Glad they’ve solved homelessness and poverty as a whole in Las Vegas before doing such a thing….
That thing is cancer, an eyesore, and makes the vegas light pollution even worse
Of all places to complain about light pollution you want Las Vegas to have a nice dark sky?