Electrosonic and Smart Monkeys deliver a groundbreaking venue show control solution for the Sphere.
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Sphere, a fully immersive Las Vegas entertainment venue, redefines the live entertainment experience with a scale, scope and technical complexity that extends the boundaries of technology.
This massive domed structure brings together the world’s most advanced experiential technologies. Outside, is the world’s largest programmable LED screen consisting of 1.2M custom-designed LED pucks with 48-LEDs serving as a single pixel in the exoskeleton exterior display. Inside, the curved digital screen offers 160,000 square feet of display area at a stunning 16K x 16K resolution. The world’s largest fully integrated concert-grade audio system includes 1600 fixed speaker modules and 300 mobile loudspeaker modules.
To make those technologies operate as a single holistic system and bring the creative vision to life, Electrosonic partnered with Smart Monkeys to design, engineer and install an innovative Venue Control System.
* Photos courtesy of Sphere Entertainment Co.
The Venue Control System (VCS) interconnects all technology elements into a single, robust, fully integrated solution that performs with ultimate reliability. The solution also manages and monitors timing and queuing of vast amounts of multimedia content.
The VCS provides two integrated control systems – a Show Control System and an Event System Supervisor. The Show Control System controls audio, video, lighting and special effects. The Event System Supervisor monitors and manages all permanent always-on systems.
The solution is based on Smart Monkey’s ISAAC system – a virtualized platform that interfaces with next-generation content delivery and control technologies and enables ultimate flexibility and mission-critical resiliency.
Smart Monkeys designed the solution and handled all the programming. Electrosonic’s role was system engineering, supply and build of the system, installation and overall project management. Electrosonic also integrated the venue’s multiple technology subsystems with the ISAAC platform to enable all elements to be managed and monitored centrally from a single networked source.
The result is a control solution that links all show elements together, is easy to program, stable, simple to deploy and operate and highly resilient.
Electrosonic and Smart Monkeys’ task was to develop a venue control system that could manage and control so many complex innovative technologies. A control solution so complex had never been developed on this scale.
The challenge was to make all the disparate technologies work together and ensure they are queued and timed properly to immerse guests in the story. The goal was to make all the elements work seamlessly together so that what the audience sees, hears and feels is perfectly integrated.
To deliver the Sphere’s full creative potential the Electrosonic- Smart Monkey’s team brought together more than 36 technology subsystems to control and monitor audio, video, lighting, special effects and rigging using the ISAAC platform. The platform interfaces with next-generation content delivery and control technologies.
Venue teams access the platform to activate show elements while ISAAC manages and monitors cue scheduling, time-sensitive sequencing, command processing and execution and communication with all subsystems.
No entertainment venue has brought so many groundbreaking technologies together to deliver such a revolutionary guest experience. The combination of so many groundbreaking technologies and a control system so sophisticated represents a momentum shift in the experiential technology industry.
Only Electrosonic and Smart Monkeys have the skills, experience, resources and technology to deliver innovative control solutions on this scale.
