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Temporary structures, like the ones at Tomorrowland, generally support less weight than permanent ones, like an arena or stadium. Any show has to hang or sit on something, and a stage can only handle a certain amount of weight. Sketch by Liam Tomaszewski (Show Design by Liam Tomaszewski, Ross Chapple, Mark Calvert, Dave Green, and Bryn Williams)Ī sphere sounds simple enough, but bringing the Holosphere to life was a difficult endeavor. That space is crucial to trick the eye into thinking the sphere is “transparent,” allowing audiences to both see animations displayed on the sphere and Prydz DJing inside of it. But that won’t be noticeable from far away. There are big gaps between each strip, so the sphere has a lower resolution than most traditional LED panels. Light Initiative founder Bryn Williams designed the panels to be modular, so if an LED fails, the individual strip can be popped out and replaced within seconds.Īt a warehouse in London, Williams has me help assemble a panel: I peel off an LED strip’s backing, stick it into a custom plastic extrusion with raised sides, and then snap the strip in tiny grooves that run along the panel. Seventy-two handmade panels in varying shapes interlock onto a metal skeleton to construct the Holosphere, and they’re laced with LEDs both inside and out. “All these shows have been amazing,” he says, “but at the end of the day they were two-dimensional projections.” Using a physical sphere not only provides actual depth but will let the audience see the Holosphere’s larger-than-life visuals from all sorts of different angles without any distortion. Getting rid of holographic trickery seemed like the next logical step for EPIC, says Prydz’s longtime collaborator Mark Calvert from London-based tech company Realtime Environment Systems (RES). That tiny gray stick figure standing inside? It’s Prydz. If you look closely at the show’s lighting map, you’ll get a sense of the Holosphere’s sheer scale. Depending on how much of the sphere lights up and at what intensity, Prydz can be clearly seen inside, or nearly disappear. During the performance, the Holosphere will illuminate with swirling galaxies, crackle with darts of electricity, and transform into slowly rotating alien planets. In their place is the multistory sphere, kitted out with over 2.4 million LEDs.
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The upcoming Holosphere is a complete redesign that does away with projected holographic effects. While Prydz DJs on a riser inside, millions of pixels and hundreds of lights will flash futuristic scenes around him that tower over the crowd.ĮPIC shows are extravagant, complicated, and expensive The centerpiece is an eight-meter-wide sphere, and the whole production is so large the festival had to redesign its grounds in order to accommodate it.
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He and his team have been working on the Holosphere for the past two years and will reveal it at Belgium’s Tomorrowland festival on Saturday, July 20th. Prydz has set a high bar, but this new show might be his most ambitious. “Ever since we started doing EPIC,” Prydz says, “our goal has always been to try and blow people away, but in a way that they haven’t been blown away before at an electronic dance music event.” The first EPIC was in 2011, and over time the show has grown into one of dance music’s most bombastic multi-sensory events, employing hundreds of laser beams, digital screens larger than a jumbo jet, and colossal holographic effects. This year, Prydz is pulling off the most grandiose performance to date, in the form of a giant transparent LED sphere called EPIC 6.0: Holosphere. Every EPIC is a limited engagement that pushes the limits of how tech and music interact.
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The world-famous DJ is set to debut his latest Eric Prydz In Concert (EPIC) show - a big and ambitious experience that draws tens of thousands of fans and gets the entire dance world talking. Two weeks from now, Eric Prydz will stand inside a glowing sphere that’s more than two stories tall as he performs to a crowd of thousands.