Vegas Sphere Teams with Google AI to Bring Dorothy Home

• The Sphere is using Google AI to bring 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz” to its 160K square-foot wraparound screen 
• Instead of showing them in close-ups, the film will mostly keep the beloved characters on screen together, making the experience more like watching actors sharing a stage in a play
• The amount of data processed so far is equivalent to 27 years of continuous Netflix watching

Google and Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) announced an AI technology partnership for “The Wizard of Oz,” a digitally supercharged version of which is scheduled to open at the Las Vegas Sphere on Aug. 28.

To enhance the 1939 classic’s dated resolution to a crisp 16K requires AI to fill in missing pixels, extend backgrounds and digitally recreate existing characters who never appeared together in the same frames of the same scenes before.

Whereas the original relied heavily on close-ups, this “Wizard” will place Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion on the Sphere’s 160K square-foot wraparound screen for the duration of many scenes. This will make it feel like the actors are occupying a stage together.

But AI isn’t quite there yet, so thousands of creators, coders and VFX artists at Google Cloud and Google DeepMind are bringing it there — programming Gemini, Veo 2 and Imagen 3 AI models for the punishing task.

Sphere Off to See the Wizard

The Sphere’s $80 million update, for which it also collaborated with Warner Bros. Discovery and Magnopus, will employ spatial audio, climate control, scent integration, and haptic seating to immerse audiences.

An incredible 1.2 petabytes of data have been processed to date. That’s the equivalent of 27 years of continuous Netflix watching.

“The power of generative AI, combined with Google’s infrastructure and expertise, is helping us to achieve something extraordinary,” said James Dolan, Sphere Entertainment’s executive chairman and CEO.

“We needed a partner who could push boundaries alongside our teams at Sphere Studios and Magnopus, and Google was the only company equipped to meet the challenge on the world’s highest resolution LED screen.”

The running time of “The Wizard of Oz’ will be chopped from 101 minutes to 80 to facilitate more showings per day.

Neither ticket prices, nor an on-sale date, have been announced yet.