Some see it as the new era of entertainment. Others see it as a science-fiction movie becoming reality. No matter your perspective, we can all agree that Sphere is one of the most buzzed about things on the internet right now.

Ever since it powered on (or landed, depending on what Reddit conspiracy theory board you’re on), the $2 billion Las Vegas Strip mega-venue has dazzled onlookers with its 580,000-square-foot LED exterior. Visual media artist Refik Anadol even used the fully programmable exosphere as a canvas for his art project, Machine Hallucinations: Sphere.

“There’s a lot of very forward thinking technology in this build, from camera systems to processing to network devices, to audio systems to the playback of the video,” says Alex Luthwaite, senior vice president of show systems technology. “There are things in the market that take individual elements of this, but nothing that puts it all together, and nothing on this scale.”

Standing 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide, Sphere is pure wizardry, and it’s time to experience the magic. Counting down to U2’s UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere residency, Luthwaite walked us through the venue’s most impressive tech.

It’s a Beautiful Display

Earlier this month, Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky showed off Sphere’s interior with a preview of Postcard from Earth, a film that will make use of the venue’s 160,000-square-foot screen display when it debuts on October 6.

In the footage of that preview, an elephant stomps into view on the giant display. The screen itself stretches well past the stage floor and over the seated audience members’ heads. The angle is so severe, the mammoth appears to be looking down on them, its ivory tusks just missing viewers by a hair.

Luthwaite says VR headsets have historically been used to achieve that level of immersion, but Sphere uses nothing of the sort. The interior screen is custom-built like a hemisphere to perfect your sightlines. It has no corners or edges and offers 16k x 16k resolution, the highest of any LED resolution known to date.

It’s also surprisingly lightweight. “We removed absolutely everything from it to allow for the acoustic transparency and the airflow to go through that screen,” Luthwaite says.

Sounds of Experience

Sphere’s dome shape is a game-changer for cinematics. But for audio, it had an uphill battle. “A dome is really the worst acoustic environment to play in because it just bounces the sound around,” Luthwaite says. “We’ve had to spend an awful lot of time controlling that.”

To offset the problem, the theater uses Sphere Immersive Sound, a proprietary concert-grade system powered by German audio titan Holoplot. The custom system utilizes 1,600

installed and 300 mobile X1 Matrix Array loudspeaker modules from Holoplot, sculpting a whole new sonic experience.

“A lot of people start these sorts of atmospheric spatial mixes with Dolby 5.1, Dolby 7.1, Dolby Atmos. We take that as a starting point and put it on steroids,” Luthwaite says. “The way to think about it is that it’s a laser-focused sound system. We give everybody in the building the same acoustic experience.”

With the power of more than 167,000 amplified loudspeaker drivers, Sphere can precisely control where sound goes. Forget the overblown bass in the front row, or the muddy vocals in the back. This audio’s refined and specialized. Sphere can even play music in different languages for different sections of the audience.

And the best part? “You don’t know where any of the speakers are,” he says. “We’ve really managed to try and hide all that and keep the impression that we’re taking you somewhere.”

Sit, Rattle and Hum

It’s natural to want to stand and applaud a great concert. But inside Sphere, you may have more fun sitting this one out. Out of its seated capacity of more than 17,000, Sphere has 10,000 chairs set aside for a haptic feedback experience, where built-in drivers cause seats to vibrate to the timing of the music. A rumbling Harley, a breakneck drum solo—all of it can be felt in full.

“It contributes to you feeling like it’s much louder in the venue than it really is without your ears hurting,” Luthwaite says. “So when the whole seat is vibrating along to the kick track or the bassline or in our cinematic environments, we can use it for effects.”

Those effects can range from icy blasts from the Antarctic, he says, to humid tundra temps or even scents. The goal, as with everything at Sphere, is to whisk you away.

“We don’t want people just to sit there and watch something static anymore,” he says. “We want people to be more engaged and more involved.”

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