AI Enhances 'The Wizard of Oz' for Immersive Experience at Las Vegas Sphere

Inside the Las Vegas Sphere's plans to enhance 'The Wizard of Oz' using AI

The Las Vegas Sphere has already secured its place as one of the best displays off the Strip with its eye-catching visuals. NEW YORK - The yellow brick road is about to get colossal when it winds through the Las Vegas Sphere. Between the venue's 160,000-square-foot screen display that anchors the visual environment and remastered songs that will play through 167,000 speakers from Sphere Immersive Sound, the enhanced version of "The Wizard of Oz" will definitely not be in Kansas anymore when it arrives Aug. 28. The intent, says Jennifer Koester, president and COO of the Sphere, is to answer the question, "What would it feel like to be in Oz?" Through the venue's haptic seats, viewers will feel the swirls of the tornado that whisk Dorothy's house to Munchkinland, smell the poppies as they envelop the room in 16K x 16K LED screen resolution, tremble a little with the Cowardly Lion and maybe make those flying monkeys feel exceptionally realistic. Tickets to the immersive version of "The Wizard of Oz" are on sale now at thesphere.com. The film will be shown multiple times daily for an open-ended run. The ambitious amplification of the iconic movie is possible through a marriage between artificial intelligence and film archives from Warner Bros. and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The dual components allowed creators "to make things that weren't possible, possible," Koester says in a sitdown with USA TODAY, while still maintaining the integrity of the original film. Koester uses the example of Dorothy's limbs, which, when filmed for a 4:3 aspect ratio on a standard-size movie screen in 1939, didn't always include full images. "The original film was shot so you have a picture of Dorothy, but you don't see her hands, you don't see her legs. When you think about (the size of) the (Sphere) screen, you know her hands and legs were there and we want to show them," Koester says. Working with additional footage that never made it into the film and set designs for the film, "we trained (AI) models on all of that original footage. So now we can create an arm for Dorothy or fill in her legs from that AI model." In addition to the visuals, the original songs from the film including treasured favorites "We're Off to See the Wizard," "Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead" and Judy Garland's timeless "Over the Rainbow," have been remastered and their orchestrations rerecorded. Koester says an 80-piece orchestra was brought to the original MGM scoring stage near Los Angeles to redo the entire soundtrack, which, when combined with the Sphere's haptics, will augment the immersive experience. "Imagine the feeling you can evoke because you're coming down the yellow brick road into the spooky forest," Koester says. "And to your left you're hearing spooky sounds and then maybe some of the flying monkeys on your right. It's the evocation of feeling that becomes so possible because of the technology that exists in that venue." The all-encompassing experience will carry a ticket price of $104, which aligns with the current Sphere films "Postcard from Earth" from filmmaker Darren Aronofsky and "V-U2," the startlingly lifelike concert film taken from U2's Sphere-opening residency. As with all things related to the venue, it isn't about the experience you think you know, it's about the unexpected. Koester hints that the immersions will begin as soon as you enter the Sphere and walk into its cavernous atrium that will "transform you into the world of Kansas" and later, "when you exit the (seats) and you've been through Oz, there's going to be some really innovative and interactive activations." The venue is promoting its Sphere-icized "Wizard of Oz" with an outdoor installation suggesting that the venue has landed atop the Wicked Witch of the East, complete with her 50-foot-long legs and 22-foot-tall ruby slippers extended onto the ground. The legs will be on view all the time, but daily photo opportunities on the Sphere campus are subject to times listed at thesphere.com. "It's larger than life," Koester says, "and just a hint to what's about to happen inside."

The Sphere Is Ready to Take Visitors Over the Rainbow and Into 'The Wizard of Oz'

Early Tuesday morning, the Sphere in Las Vegas was hit by a hurricane, or at least a virtual hurricane. The building's "Exosphere" swirled with storm clouds, and a digital house appeared when the smoke cleared, with a pair of legs and ruby slippers, 50 feet long and 2 feet high emerging from the Sphere. The stunt is meant to kick off the Sphere's announcement that it would begin selling tickets to The Wizard of Oz, which will premiere in the venue Aug. 28. "We thought it was appropriate to start with a stunt that really matches the size and scale of Sphere," Sphere president and COO Jennifer Koester tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. "I think the tornado showing up on the exosphere for our on sale moment is a good representation of what will happen inside the bowl when we think about an immersive experience of the Wizard of Oz." As Koester notes, as larger than life as the on sale stunt is, it is merely teeing up the actual Wizard of Oz at the Sphere itself, which is being produced by Sphere Studios, Warner Bros. Discovery, Google (which will contribute its artificial intelligence expertise) and Magnopus, with Academy Award and Emmy-nominee Jane Rosenthal among the producers. "When you look at the original film, what it did in terms of technology at its time, going into Technicolor, you look at the magic of it, whether it's the ruby slippers or the tornado scene. So much of what's in The Wizard of Oz that could naturally fit into an immersive environment like the Sphere," Rosenthal tells THR in an interview. "What you can do now, when you hear Judy Garland sing 'Somewhere over the Rainbow,' it's a whole different emotional experience." Indeed, in a statement, Warner Bros. Discovery film chiefs Michael DeLuca and Pam Abdy note that the original film was an originator in Hollywood technology. "A technical marvel of its time, the film pushed the boundaries of filmmaking to bring audiences an experience unlike anything they had seen before," DeLuca and Abdy said. "With The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, audiences will have the chance to see the film adapted into an entirely new and groundbreaking medium that celebrates the wonder and glory of its Technicolor roots." Koester and Rosenthal are still mum on many of the specifics of what the experience will entail, but they are willing to tease a bit of what visitors to the Las Vegas attraction can expect. "Imagine what it would be like to be in a tornado in the Sphere where you've got wind coming at you, you've got scents coming at you, you've got leaves coming at you, your hair is flying all over, you feel as though you are in that tornado with Dorothy, and that's what it's all about," Koester says. "The Wizard of Oz at sphere will be this immersive experience. It's not a passive viewing experience. You're not going to watch a movie, you are going to live a movie. You're going to feel it, to see it, to touch it, to smell it." "You're now in the movie, you're going down the Yellow Brick road, you're, fully immersed in it," Rosenthal says. And the companies and producers are using AI to help create the experience, with Koester and Rosenthal explaining that they leveraged original archival footage and images from the period to help expand the film from its original 4:3 aspect ratio to the Sphere's 160,000 sq foot and 16K resolution screen. "We're not taking this classic and beloved film and just stretching it out, we're taking what was originally a four by three, and we are augmenting it using AI," Koester says, adding that things like Dorothy's legs, which were cut off in some scenes, can be added back in. "We've gone and trained models alongside Google with archival footage about Wizard of Oz, footage from the Academy, the original film materials that represent the true life characters. And we've trained the models so that we can use AI to now give Dorothy legs in that image, because we know they were there, but we want them on the screen to fill the media plane. "When you come to the sphere and you you sit there and you experience Wizard of Oz, everything will be in focus," Koester added. "When you look over your head, there'll be poppies in the back that are in focus, because you're going to be in the perspective of Dorothy and the characters. That's what's so unique, and that's where we've used technology to make this experience possible that wouldn't have been possible without the technology to basically give you the perspective and the feeling of the characters that are in the film. So you feel like you're in Oz with them. You're in Emerald City with them. You smell what it's like to be in Emerald City." For Sphere, The Wizard of Oz is also a big bet on the future of experiential entertainment, providing an entirely new experience that complement Postcard From Earth, the nature docuseries.