Darlene and I just made a short trip to Las Vegas midweek to see The Wizard of Oz @ The Sphere.  They chopped the heck out of the original movie to make this production (and scale down the runtime) but the whole immersive experience is pretty wild and amazing – from tornado wind effects and flying debris to falling snow and apples.  It’s definitely fun and worthwhile.

This video highlights some of what went into producing this experience and it was clearly quite the effort but I was also amused to see all the funny compromises needed to fill out the massive spherical display from the original 85-year old movie.  In particular, you can see how they had to cut and paste various background characters to fill out the now expansive view – many are looking off in odd directions or stuck in little loops of motion or unnaturally still or even sized disproportionately.  There are missing shadows and other compositing difficulties and all of the dialog echoes like sound in a stadium (because I guess that’s how big the space is) but it doesn’t matter – it’s still a fantastic spectacle!  And yes, section 306 is the prime viewing area as others have reported – not too low, not too high and everything viewed straight on.

We stayed two nights at The Venetian to have a view of the outside of The Sphere.  (We suspect now that the rooms at the Pallazzo have a more direct view than what we had in the North Tower but it was fine.) We spent the first half of the day at Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas installation (“Omega Mart”) – an interactive, immersive experience located in the Area 15 complex of attractions.  It was fun and the amount of detail they put into everything is impressive – from the props to the backstory.  You can engage with and digest the material to various degrees from just casually walking around to poring over the materials and interacting with the various terminals to solve the mystery or complete a sort of intensive scavenger hunt.  We spent a middle ground of three hours just checking things out and completing the objectives associated with the optional employee “boop” card.

After lunch we spent a little time exploring some of the other attractions in Area 15 and then we headed back to our hotel ahead of the Wizard of Oz show by way of a free demo ride in a Zoox vehicle – a unique looking autonomous vehicle.

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