The Las Vegas Sphere is the world’s largest spherical LED screen used to display concerts and various entertainment content. The Sphere is capable of creating truly outstanding visuals, from planets and satellites to exclusive works of art. This is a joint project between Sphere Entertainment and Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi.
After the recent full launch of Sphere during the U2 concert, Sphere Entertainment shared the technical specifications of this grand screen. Sphere has a footprint of 580,000 square feet (53884 m2) and an interior area of —160,000 square feet (14865 m2).
Both the indoor and outdoor screens support 16K video output. They each rely on a set of 27 nodes, each providing 4K streaming via Hitachi Vantara software. The system contains a whopping 4 PB (1 PB = 1024 TB) of flash memory with a data transfer rate of 400 GB/s. Full 4:4:4 color subsampling is also used. The displays are characterized by a latency of about 5 ms or less.
Modern movies and games do not provide playback of content in 16K resolution. However, this problem is solved by optimizing the existing content accordingly and using Sphere Entertainment’s own Big Sky camera, which can shoot at up to 18K resolution.
Source: tomshardware