The Las Vegas Strip is big on endless construction and it's hot on imploding older buildings. But when it comes to creating memorable visual landmarks, modern Vegas usually folds.
After the 1990s heyday of iconic Strip architecture passed, most of the towers erected on Las Vegas Boulevard have looked like lightly themed columns of rooms straddling convention centers, which is essentially what they are.
But in 2023, Las Vegas accomplished something it hadn't pulled off in nearly 30 years. The city created a new visual landmark that defines the skyline.
When visitors come to Sin City now, all eyes land on Sphere, a gargantuan globe-shaped digital billboard that houses a performance arena.
What is Sphere in Las Vegas?
Sphere is 516 feet wide and a mammoth 366 feet in height (plus a tiny, federally mandated red aircraft beacon on top, like a hat waring a hat). The exterior is sheathed in a framework of 1.2 million LED pucks (pictured below) capable of illuminating in unison to create luridly colored, Godzilla-size animations visible for dozens of miles away.
Inside the venue, there's seating capacity for 17,600, or 20,000 with standing room. The venue's defining feature is the world's largest high-definition display: a wraparound, 160,000-square-foot digital screen that fully envelops your peripheral vision from side to side and above your head. Independent from the light show on Sphere's exterior, the indoor spectacle dazzles the audience with 16K resolution. The detail is so fine that in most cases images are hyperrealistic, and the viewing sensations are augmented by puffs of air, gentle aromas, and bursts of booty-quivering "infrasound haptic" bass speakers.
Sphere is captivating to look at, inside and out—here's our guide to the best viewing points and hotel rooms in Vegas for doing that. There's no denying the landmark's magnetic appeal, especially when it twitters with color after sundown like a skyscraper-scaled video game. Visually, it's an endlessly pleasing technical masterpiece.
Or at least, a brilliant first draft of a masterpiece that may requre revisions.
As magnificent as the visuals are, you can't shake the feeling that the people behind Sphere have bitten off a little more than they can chew. The technical risks they have taken are so envelope-pushing that Sphere's operating costs are as galactic as its planetary appearance.
How much does Sphere cost to run?
"Beyond the $2.3 billion spent on its construction, it's estimated that the Sphere is capable of drawing 28,000,000 watts of power," writes Andy Edser of PC Gamer magazine. "For reference, 1,000,000 watts, or 1 megawatt, is said to be enough to satisfy the instantaneous demand of 750 homes at once in the California/Nevada area, meaning that 28 megawatts would be equivalent to the power necessary for 21,000 homes."
Sphere's public accounting reveals that the venue had to pay $67.3 million in operating costs for the second quarter of 2024.
Some of that can be recouped by selling exterior animation to advertisers. But as popular (and as distracting) as digital billboards are becoming, Sphere isn't selling all of its display time—and it shouldn't if owners want to maintain a sense of magic rather than creating just another commercial eyesore.
Another way to help cover expenses: Open the doors for paid visits. After all, Sphere is the rare performance venue that is so unique that people want to have a look around even when there are no shows booked onstage.
For that purpose, there's The Sphere Experience, a ticketed program that allows paying guests to see the interior of Sphere at scheduled times and now provides the bulk of the project's revenue.
The main event of the experience is a viewing of Postcard from Earth, a 55-minute film from celebrated director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Whale) designed to show off Sphere's capabilities with sublime footage from around the world.
The production standards for Postcard from Earth are as impeccable as you would expect. The images that filmmakers obtained are frequently breathtaking, and they show off Sphere's technical bona fides like a goose-bump galactic version of a TV floor model at Best Buy.
Crucially, Aronofsky was noticeably careful not to allow the enormous screen's immersive dimensions to disorient viewers. He keeps a close check on camera movements: slow forward tracking, slow backward tracking, the rare lateral pan, all in the flattened-perspective tradition of Wes Anderson or Buster Keaton that allows audiences the time and stability to soak up details. (In one memorably meta segment shot from the stage of a multitiered vintage opera house full of patrons, the Sphere's audience is observed right back in ultrafine detail.) It's up to viewers to turn their heads to see more; Aronofsky adds no gratuitous somersaulting or twisty movements that would make an audience feel like the room is rotating.
The footage was shot in locations around the planet from every continent, although travelers will have to guess exactly where unless they stick around for the list of filming locations in the final credits. The naked spectacle is stitched together by the theme of ecological preservation—which is ironic, if not hypocritical, considering the vast amount of power that must be consumed for each screening.
Ultimately, the movie is a modern iteration of the age-old theme park travelogue film, like Walt Disney's Circle-Vision 360, the Six Flags Chevy Show, and EPCOT's Soarin' (though to be sure, the old-fashioned, trusty movie travelogue genre stretches back further than those examples). If the Walt Disney Company was still on its game, it would have harnessed technology to imagine something like this first.
How to see the movie inside the Vegas Sphere
Tickets to The Sphere Experience typically cost around $114–$191 each, although with extreme advance planning and luck, tickets can occasionally be found for $94. More expensive packages like "Director's Seats" that add minor perks like snacks are available, but since most seats already have excellent sightlines and sound, upgrades are not really worth it.
Unfortunately, Sphere's ticketing partner is Ticketmaster, which stacks on extra fees of more than $22 per ticket.
Those kinds of numbers will help push Sphere toward recoupment, but it's a lot of money for a movie, even one as precision-crafted as Postcard. At these prices, you could buy a ticket to visit an entire theme park.
To try to make the Sphere Experience seem more substantial, organizers added a few exhibits in the lobby, called Atrium. On the way to their seats, guests can pause at a demonstration of targeted speaker technology or crowd around a few copies of Aura, a robot figure (another thing Disney did first 60 years ago) programmed to extol the purported potential that AI has to liberate us all. 
Aura still needs the help of a live staff member to pass a mic to guests for questions. The robot's responses tend to sound like corporate-speak: "I believe that technology can be utilized to help people with many different kinds of disabilities."
It's the kind of flashy boosterism of a vague future delivered under groovy cobalt-colored lights that American tourists have already seen—and walked quickly past—at EPCOT's old CommuniCore in the 1980s. You won't actually learn anything, but it's cool to see for a minute.
Tips for seeing The Sphere Experience at Sphere in Las Vegas
• Because Sphere is frequently booked for events, the schedule for The Sphere Experience changes by the day. On dates with no other events, there can be as many as four screenings. On weekends, the first showing can be at 11:30am and the last at 9:30pm. The screening schedule is posted far in advance at TheSphere.com.
• Sphere will charge you $45–$65 for parking during major events if booked through the venue's website, or $15 through Ticketmaster, so it's wiser to park elsewhere and walk or ride over.
• Sphere is connected by a 10-minute walk through the innards of the Venetian Resort's casino floor and convention spaces. Part of Sphere's high operating expenses go to Venetian staff members—for reasons of its own, the resort did not install permanent directional signage to Sphere, instead hiring a fleet of workers to hold lollipop directional signs before each showtime.
• Hand baggage is tightly restricted. Bags must be no larger than 6" x 6" by 2" (15 cm x 15 cm x 5 cm). Video cameras and recording devices are prohibited, although smartphones are allowed. (Sphere has lockers for rental for $10–$15, but attendees of the Sphere Experience aren't generally allowed to bring in large objects to put in the lockers, anyway.)
• Although doors open about 45 minutes before showtime, Sphere's security and ticket scanners are slow to process arrivals, so even if you arrive early, you may not have much time to see and buy things in the Atrium.
• Concessions, while available, are priced for the big-ticket concert events held at night. In 2024, cocktails are $25, beer is $20, and soda or water is $7. Snacks like hot dogs and hot chicken sandwiches cost $14–$20. Most guests at The Sphere Experience skip the concessions—even if you can afford them, there's not much time to enjoy them.
• Souvenirs are sold at kiosks on the lobby floor. A simple Sphere T-shirt is $35; sweatshirts are $70, and tote bags are $150–$250.
• The aisles of the seating area can be extremely steep. Guests with vertigo or mobility issues should go carefully or with assistance. Don't risk walking in the aisle when the film is showing or you may get disoriented.
• In our experience, it's better to look downward at Sphere than to have to crane your neck up. So seats on upper levels, particularly in the 300 section, are better than seats on the lower ring in the 200s—but no seats are truly bad except, perhaps, at the extreme sides.
• After the show, taxis and ride-shares are available on the west side of the building. The queue for rides is slow-moving.
Postcard from Earth is beautifully executed and the technology behind Sphere is, at least for now, cutting-edge, with sensations you can literally feel in your bones. But the high quality of the film is surpassed by the extremely high ticket price.
Despite the mastery of The Sphere Experience's film (a standard that doesn't extend to the pre-show filler "exhibits"), this is still just a 55-minute movie, and guests will be deposited back on the street 90 minutes after arriving. Consider attending a concert, where you'll probably get more Sphere bang for your buck. For most vacationers' budgets, seeing an excellent short film probably doesn't earn the $140 ticket price Sphere is charging to claw back the expenses of building this impressive project.
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