The top of the Las Vegas Sphere had opened, and mortgage loan officer Danielle Renee , of Washington State, was peering upwards in awe at millions of stars. She was going into space – and the Backstreet Boys were driving.
“Oh my gosh, it was incredible,” she says. “I don’t know how another show could beat it.”
Renee, a decades-long Backstreet Boys fan, went to the Las Vegas Sphere in early February and was wowed both by the band’s performance and the visual effects on the giant concave screen that covers a 15,000 sq m portion of the Sphere’s interior surface. The night sky, the bands’ spaceship, all of it was graphics.
Renee, who has seen the Backstreet Boys more than once before, says “nothing compares” to this new show. “Everyone was dancing, everyone was singing along.”
Sphere-style entertainment spaces are becoming more popular. Rival Cosm, for example, is opening dome-like facilities in multiple US cities, where audiences can watch live sports events or films including The Matrix with additional visual effects that envelop the portion of the screen showing the movie.
Proponents say this is the future of entertainment – supposedly more immersive, more experiential.
But audiences have heard that before about, for example, 3D cinema, which has failed to gain significant traction more than once over the years. The challenge is to prove that visually-overwhelming domes can do any better.
The Las Vegas Sphere, which cost a galactic $2.3bn (£1.72bn), has hosted a variety of different shows since it opened in September 2023 – from a new version of The Wizard of Oz, with added visual effects, to a residency by Irish rockers U2. Tickets generally cost at least $100, sometimes much more.
For years, commentators questioned the financial viability of such a venue. Was it an exciting new form of entertainment, or a boondoggle?
Early in 2025, multiple observers highlighted the Sphere’s ongoing struggle to make money and one critic was left “confused and slightly dismayed” by their visit.
But, as more shows came along, the Sphere has finally turned a profit. In February, Sphere Entertainment reported a net income of $57.6m for the 2025 calendar year. The company declined to speak to the BBC for this article.
“For me, watching a movie is enough of an experience,” says creativity and innovation researcher Manel González-Piñero at the University of Barcelona , who has seen The Wizard of Oz at the Las Vegas Sphere. “I don’t need to complement the experience with something new.”
However, he says the Sphere is a “prototype” that appears to be working well in the sense of offering content to audiences in a unique format.
Last year, Sphere Entertainment announced its plan to bring “mini Spheres”, with 5,000-seat capacity, to other locations. González-Piñero says he is not sure such facilities would suit cities such as Milan or Amsterdam. It might make more sense to think of the Sphere as a one-off, a Las Vegas-specific attraction, he suggests.
But Ben Wood, chief analyst at FDM/CCS Insight, a market research firm, found the Sphere “jaw-dropping” when he visited and says he was dismayed to see so much opposition to a sister Sphere in East London.
Plans for such a facility were withdrawn in 2024 after London Mayor Sadiq Khan refused to grant it planning permission.
Venues with large concave screens allow audiences to feel as though they’ve witnessing a kind of augmented reality, or that they have put on a virtual reality headset, adds Wood: “It’s an amazing, futuristic metaphor for the way people consume content.”
Though, he does say he can understand why some people might be turned off by the sheer excess of it. Wood’s hotel room looked out at the Sphere, which has an even bigger exterior screen that displays animations and various other content, including, at times, an eye. “This thing’s winking at you,” says Wood.
An alternative kind of venue is offered by Cosm, which emerged after a merger involving Evans & Sutherland, a company that developed digital projection technology widely used in planetariums and science centres.
Today, Cosm is using its experience in display tech software to bring live sports and visually augmented movie presentations to LED screens, which have largely taken over from projector systems.
“We are very much a software company,” says Devin Poolman, chief product and technology officer. Though, he adds, “The LEDs are designed by our team so they are pretty unique for those doubly curved, effectively domed displays.”
Cosm has venues in Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta in the US, with two more planned for Cleveland and Detroit.
Poolman says the goal is to have “more than 100 worldwide”, however, he will not be drawn on whether the facilities are yet profitable. “We feel very confident in the strength of our business.”
It’s worth remembering that the idea of entertainment venues making use of dome shapes is far from new. Cinerama constructed dome-shaped cinemas in the US in the 1960s. Imax followed in the subsequent years.
There’s something special about more fully illuminating the interior of a dome, says James Lanier, founder and president of Absolute Hollywood, a company that, since the late 1990s, has set up temporary and semi-permanent inflatable domes that house internally projected shows.
Unlike the Las Vegas Sphere, he stresses, visitors are generally free to walk around – or even lie down and look straight up – at the presentation.
He recalls one installation for a royal wedding in the Middle East, where performances by singers and dancers – filmed separately in nearby tents – were beamed into the central dome for guests to enjoy. “It was a very surreal experience,” says Lanier.
It may not be for everyone, but dome-based entertainment clearly has the power to captivate some. Danielle Renee is already planning to revisit the Backstreet Boys at the Las Vegas Sphere.
“I actually just got an email this morning [about] their final shows of the summer,” she says. “I was looking to see how I could get there again.”
