GIANT 27m LED Dome BTS We Tour the Tech

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: What if you could step inside the stadium, the energy, the sound, the absolute thrill, without leaving your seat? Well, forget about the nosebleeds, because today I'm transporting you to Qasem, Los Angeles, on a behind-the-scenes tour. So get ready for the technology behind Shared Reality, because this place is awesome! I'm here in Inglewood, California, to take a look at Qasem, Los Angeles. We're going to look at all the technology that powers this live immersive experience, so let's get to it. You get to see amazing live events and also productions on a giant dome. I'm on the third level right now, and I'm going down into the stadium seating. Guys, we got to see this yesterday, running live, and it was amazing. To show us how all this great tech from Dell is integrated with the venue, and a whole lot more, is Qasem's Chief Product and Technology Officer, Devin Pullman. Devin walks us through several amazing demonstrations of the dome's capabilities, but also how they bring all of the sports and movies to life. [00:01:05] Speaker 2: Patrick, here we are at Qasem, where it's a 27-meter LED dome here in Los Angeles. We also have a Qasem in Dallas. We opened both of them last year. Really excited, because the whole core of Qasem is this idea of Shared Reality. Taking the immersive technologies of VR, AR, et cetera, and bringing it into physical space, and do that with the biggest and best of life sporting events and entertainment events, and really take advantage of the fandom, creating a place for fans to come together and experience this. We're rolling out in Atlanta, Detroit. We have Cleveland right behind it. And as you can imagine, we're looking to bring Qasems everywhere. We're aiming over 100 all around the world, bringing this technology and really access to these events to fans all over the world. [00:01:42] Speaker 1: This is far from just watching a game at a bar. Instead, it feels like you're watching football, hockey, or other events live, like you're there. [00:01:52] Speaker 2: So here you get a variety of everything that we do. Hockey's one of those things that's just absolutely stunning, and UFC. You can see our camera on the octagon, pressed up against the cage here, where some of the sports like UFC is about kind of getting viscerally close. Others, like soccer and Premier League here, is really about giving you that sense of place, putting you in Emirates Stadium. Seeing the fans react is just much about seeing the action up close. [00:02:20] Speaker 1: I noticed that yesterday also just the way that you experience a game is way different because instead of looking at what the TV camera is showing you, which is often very tight, you can see the receiver go and run a route, right? That even though the ball will never go there, you can see what's going on. And that's really cool. [00:02:38] Speaker 2: I think that's my favorite part about it is that you have that effect of being there, but it helps you see the tactics and the strategies. It also helps you see the celebrities on the baseline in a basketball game or, hey, what shoes are the Lakers players wearing? So what makes this possible? Well, it really is an in-and-in production. So it's our team on the ground. We really have a tight rack of Dell Precision workstations driving four to five cameras for each event. And all of those cameras are shooting at 8K or even 10.5K. We're live switching that to the cloud and bringing that down into each of our venues to give you that live experience here. [00:03:15] Speaker 1: And when they have movie events, it's far from just playing the movie on the screen. They actually have special effects and graphics that make you feel like you're immersed in the world. [00:03:24] Speaker 2: Whether you're a fan of sports or entertainment, we want this to be the place for you to watch and celebrate what you love. And here you can see we can put you completely inside of the Matrix, right? Same transporting technology that might take you to baseline to a basketball game, but now we're in a totally different world, right? You've been living in a dream world, Neil. [00:03:44] Speaker 1: One demo was of the Sistine Chapel, and this felt like you were standing there, and you could actually see so much detail all around you. It was phenomenal. [00:03:54] Speaker 2: This is a 16K cube map, meaning each face of that 360-degree cube map is 16K in resolution. We're basically inside of that right now, and because everything we do is real-time, we can go ahead and press a button, and we'll fly in. And notice, we're not just zooming in. We're actually flying in. We're getting more detail. We're actually getting up close. And now you can look at this, Fresca, like you're there. What you see here is kind of a stock Unreal Engine project, right? We're actually demonstrating bringing real-time video in because that's a core technical capability. But this is effectively something you might build for your monitor or your phone. But we're able to basically drag and drop that exact same project you're building on Unreal and drop it in here. And that's the power of really creating this as a platform for creators of all kinds. If we do the technology right, then the fans don't know the difference. Like, you know, it really is about delivering the experience more so than the technology. The technology should just disappear and just work. [00:04:51] Speaker 1: After the demos, Devin took us back to the server room where we got to see all the Dell servers and GPUs that were powering this experience. [00:04:58] Speaker 2: So we're running a different programming here in LA than Dallas. We have local ads in Dallas for a football game, different than local ads here. And we also want to cater to the fans, right? And so all the real-time graphics, the super high-resolution video, and again, we're talking about video up to 24K, that requires a lot of power. And that's what we get out of the precision workstations and the NVIDIA GPUs. And that's what allows us to do really unlimited things from a creative perspective. Again, that real-time 3D graphics, that incredibly high-resolution video, and mixing the two together. So really, Dell drives what we call our host machines, which are the systems that drive the core experience in the dome, the hall, and the deck. So each display is driven by basically a distributed rendering system. That means, for the dome, 50 different nodes, right? Each of those, Dell precision workstations, 7960s with NVIDIA, RTX 6000 Adas behind the scenes, right? Each driving a different section of that, all kept in sync, right, to deliver the experience you saw here. [00:05:56] Speaker 1: Well, and it's not just that these servers are DisplayPort outputting, like, something that goes directly onto that screen. Instead, you have your entire software translation layer that has to go through all of the stuff that we saw while we were in the dome, like the calibration, and what have you, to be able to project it onto that surface and have folks feel like they're immersed in it. [00:06:15] Speaker 2: 100%. And the key is, we had to take the learnings from driving projection systems to now driving LED. So now, instead of driving each unique projector, we're actually controlling every pixel in our own software. So the LED processor really means for us to address each pixel, control it in our own software. And that really what makes a lot of what we do here at Cosmo unique, and that it really is an end-to-end display platform tied back to the software that we're driving every pixel ourselves. Dell has been a great partner in terms of bringing not just the compute in here, but also the storage over here. You can see our Dell PowerScale from a storage perspective. You can imagine we're moving around, you know, petabytes of video data on regular, right? And Dell is touching our live production on the ground. It's touching our production workflows when we do non-live content. So you're thinking about the FX and render and post-production workflows that we do, that's running on Dell systems. And then, of course, here in the venues, delivering that experience. [00:07:08] Speaker 1: How is Qasim using AI in its workflows? [00:07:12] Speaker 2: We actually have our cameras that are being used as a part of television broadcast. In those scenarios, we're basically taking out of our, say, 10.5K video capture, we're sending the broadcaster a smaller portion of it, and then we use AI upconversion to do super slow-mos. So when you see a silky smooth replay on broadcast off of one of our cameras, that might be using our AI techniques referring to our webconversion. [00:07:36] Speaker 1: So cool. So the broadcasters actually use your cameras. Correct. [00:07:40] Speaker 2: Because we're capturing so much at incredible resolutions and with that fidelity, broadcasters through our systems can actually punch out a portion of it. It's called a virtual camera or digital pan until zoom to be able to provide to the broadcaster a subsection, you know, subsample of what we've captured overall. And we do that side by side while we're doing our live productions. We also work with broadcasters. [00:08:02] Speaker 1: I had to come to Rax to be able to find that out. So that's something new. Yeah. Awesome. So as we've looked at these servers and all of the infrastructure that powers this experience, it's one thing to look at it as, oh, you can go watch live sports with other fans here. But also think about it as a venue that can host multiple different types of events all in the same day. And that is truly something that I was not expecting when we first walked in the doors. So you could have a sporting event in the morning, then have a movie showing, then another sporting event of a totally different type of sport later in the afternoon. And the reason for that is because this is a flexible backend infrastructure that allows the single space to be used for many different applications. One of the other neat things about Cosm is that they actually have a scratch kitchen. So the food here is pretty darn good. We had it last night. It was pretty awesome to watch the game and have some good food and maybe a couple of beers. Hey, stay tuned to what Cosm is up to because they're planning to open something like 100 venues. And I'll just tell you, this is a completely different experience than either watching a game in a stadium or watching it in a bar. It's probably the best of both. The guys next to us, they were actually out from the East Coast just there to experience this thing and they loved it. And hey, if you did like this video, why don't you share it with your friends and colleagues? Give it a like, click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos. As always, thanks for watching. Have an awesome day.