The finest digital actuality expertise I’ve had this yr was not with the $500 Quest 3 or the $3,500 Apple VisionPro, and it didn’t even require a headset. Sure, it price $2.3 billion. But it got here with a reside soundtrack from an iconic rock band.

I’m speaking, in fact, about final weekend’s U2 live performance within the Sphere, the enormous set up sitting simply off the Las Vegas strip. It’s like one thing out of a Jordan Peele movie come to life. Or a contemporary Kafkaesque quick story the place a live performance area awakes in the future and finds that it has transmogrified into a large eyeball, which advertisers exploit to advertise stuff like YouTube TV’s NFL Sunday Ticket on its 580,000-square-foot pores and skin. The brainchild of Madison Square Garden Entertainment CEO James Dolan—not a popular figure in New York City—the Sphere lustily promotes itself as the way forward for leisure. It’s not a ridiculous declare.

Last weekend, I and 18,000 others filed into the Sphere’s spacious atrium after which into the amphitheater. Its 388-foot-high inside wall, surfaced with a 16K-resolution video panel that stretched as much as the ceiling and round 170 levels horizontally—all the attention can see with out turning your head—seemed to be a part of an historic steampunk citadel. A DJ pumped up the already rabid crowd, and the vibe was pure Thunderdome.

Then U2 took to the stage, a easy platform with a Brian Eno-designed raised circle harking back to a file turntable. The Irish rockers had been there to christen the Sphere, the primary of 25 reveals throughout a months-long residency. As they started to play, cracks appeared within the digital citadel wall and dirt started oozing out. Then the partitions vanished, and for the subsequent two hours out tumbled a sequence of 16K shifting pictures that, by consuming our complete visual view, had been absolutely immersive. Sound was offered by 168,000 audio system hidden behind the show.

You know that film Tron where someone got sucked into a video game? Being contained in the Sphere was a real-life sci-fi movie the place 18,000 folks had been instantly inside an over-the-top Nineteen Eighties music video. The tremendous excessive decision show bounded over the uncanny valley, displaying surroundings from locations each actual and imagined that convincingly made it look like the band—and viewers—had been transported to weird locales. There had been dizzyingly detailed collages, one a tribute to Elvis, who was at that second being dethroned by a large swarm of pixels because the King of Las Vegas. Other instances real-time pictures of the band members themselves loomed like goliaths, 100 toes tall. When the photographs started shifting towards us, or panned downward, we received that VR feeling that we had been really shifting.

The Sphere is principally an ultra-high bandwidth conduit for immense streams of digital data, with its personal server farm and about 1,000 miles of fiber optic cable. The band’s longtime inventive director, Willie Williams, commissioned a sequence of artists to create digital environments used to zip everybody by time and house. The live performance was meant to focus on U2’s full-album efficiency of its basic Achtung Baby, in addition to another hits. Fittingly, the set checklist included the tune “Vertigo.” When U2 carried out its new single “Atomic City” the band was in entrance of the throbbing Las Vegas Strip itself, with vehicles shifting on the streets and planes flying within the background. Then the buildings crumbled, and instantly they had been cranking away within the desert—what that very same land should have regarded like earlier than civilization intruded. The most spectacular impact got here towards the tip, when it appeared U2 was performing “Beautiful Day” in entrance of an enormous lake. Floating offshore was … a large sphere. As the tune progressed, the huge object drifted nearer, and we might see an aperture opening in its aspect that finally sucked us all inside. The stomach of this beast was full of birds, fish, snakes, and different fauna. Genesis itself.

After the present, some critics and music purists questioned whether or not the spectacle detracted from the music. Even Chris Blackwell, the Island Records founder who first signed U2, mentioned at a small gathering this week that whereas he loved the occasion, he felt the music received quick shrift. I get it. U2 is a well-oiled rock and roll machine and completely able to holding the eye of a large crowd. But at instances I felt like I used to be at a type of Boston Pops experiences the place John Williams conducts an orchestra to accompany a Star Wars or Superman film with a reside soundtrack. Your eyes are irresistibly drawn to the shifting pictures, not the musicians. “It’s like a fistfight between the band and the immersive screen,” says U2 guitarist and resident technophile the Edge, once we spoke just a few days after the present. “It’s almost an even fist fight. But we kind of win each night.”

He ought to test the battle card. During the Sphere live performance, there was a stretch of some considerate songs the place the hi-res floor took a breather. Roaming that turntable amongst his bandmates as he performed and sang, Bono appeared to be channeling Elvis’ well-known 1968 comeback particular. Yet as a substitute of being enchanted, my feeling was—deliver again the wild stuff on the wall! When I confess this to the Edge, he pushes again. “In the end, the songs dictate what we put on the screen, and what we do as a band in performance,” he says. “That’s still the core of this event. And without the music, it would be an empty spectacle.”