While Google Cloud’s partnership with Sphere Entertainment to reimagine The Wizard of Oz for the world’s largest screen — and by the way, it’s hemispherical — is breathtaking, the most audacious element of this remarkable undertaking is that it presents CEOs with a choice: Think small and you might survive, or dream big and you might very well thrive.
Here, at the dawn of the AI Revolution, highly advanced technology of every imaginable type is abundant and affordable — so tech is definitely not the obstacle to greatness.
Rather, the biggest challenge lies within the human brain and the human heart: Do we have the confidence and the courage to dramatically escalate the scale of our thinking to take full advantage of truly unlimited AI horsepower?
Are we willing to use AI to not only become more efficient and productive but also to completely reimagine a future that is not defined by the past but instead by our imaginations and our willingness to stop being defined by self-imposed limitations and shackled by the status quo?
To me, that was the biggest takeaway from the mind-bending experience of seeing an 86-year-old black-and-white movie originally designed for movie theaters with 700-square-foot screens completely reimagined, redesigned, reconfigured, re-enhanced, and AI-created on a 160,000-square-foot hemispherical screen.
And since words cannot possibly do justice to what Google Cloud and The Sphere and the geospatial-experience wizards at Magnopus are creating and that will debut on August 28, here are a few YouTube videos I’ve selected to give you a sense of what this wildly audacious and deeply inspiring adventure is all about:
- Google AI Reimagines Wizard of Oz for the Las Vegas Sphere! Includes excellent clips from the big preview and great background.
- The Wizard of Oz at The Las Vegas Sphere Some techy types who didn’t see the preview try to imagine what Google Cloud and The Sphere did and how they did it.
- “The Wizard of Oz” at The Sphere A film buff offers her own sense of wonder at what this giant leap of imagination will be like.
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This was a brilliant move by parent company Google and Google Cloud — the world’s fastest-growing major cloud company and currently #2 on the Cloud Wars Top 10 — to kick off the annual Google Cloud Next event in Las Vegas with a look inside the massive effort by it and several partners to convert the 1939 classic movie into an AI-enriched immersive experience.
And while, like many people, I’ve long been a fan of IMAX theaters and experiences, please believe me when I say that what The Sphere is creating is something far more powerful, stirring, and dazzling.
While my analogy might not be perfect, what The Sphere, Google Cloud, and Google DeepMind are doing is a bit like taking the Wright Brothers’ 1903 Kitty Hawk version 1.0 flyer and retrofitting it for a trip to the moon — maybe even to Mars.
For Google Cloud and its parent company, the engagement with Sphere Entertainment is more than a buyer-seller transaction; it’s a partnership that CEO James Dolan and Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian discussed at length on stage during the preview.
And while every tech company rightfully loves to showcase its world-class customers, this was something much more than that — this was a shared venture into the unknown with leaders not just willing but eager to create a very new and different future rather than settling for pumping out a slightly improved version of the past.
And, for Google Cloud and CEO Kurian, the launch in a few months of “The Wizard of Oz” at and in intense partnership with The Sphere is an absolute masterpiece on multiple fronts.
Final Thought
Market leadership is not a matter of luck; it’s a choice. And while some companies try to turn extended tenures into a virtue, the value of market longevity is declining in today’s crazy global marketplace where what you’ve done in the past has value only in its ability to drive relentless innovation into the future.
The Sphere is an entertainment venue unlike anything else in the world, and CEO Dolan and his team could have chosen to set up a psychological moat around their business and decide to relax because, after all, there’s no competition.
But complacency is a deadly trait in today’s business world, and Dolan and team rejected it out of hand by instead deciding to undertake a mission to not only reimagine and redefine what physical entertainment venues are, but also tackle the massive job of helping the movie industry — and in some ways the AI industry as well — reimagine and redefine what it will become in a world in which AI is making everything possible.
The only limiting factor is imagination.
So CEOs, start your engines!
