This Massive Screen for Live Sports Puts You in the Best Seat in the Stadium

On the sports side, both the NBA (Cosm’s first league partner) and NHL experiences are amazing. Cosm can put you courtside for NBA games, both at center court and on either baseline. The NHL program feels a touch more immersive than that, even, particularly a corner view that’s technically from outside the glass, but truly makes you feel like you’re standing on the rink itself.

UFC was another highlight. Cosm’s standard UFC viewing angle is a perch just above the octagon, as if you were sitting on a magic carpet hovering a few feet off the ground; it’s a far better view than I’ve ever seen on a UFC pay-per-view. “We had a few fights where there was blood on the lenses,” Cosm president and CEO Jeb Terry tells me.

There are other views for UFC events as well, including octagon-side. Between bouts, it pans back to a wide shot in the stands.

“I feel like I have a seat in the crowd,” says Alon Cohen, UFC senior VP of research and development, of what it’s like to watch a match at a Cosm venue. “It gives you a different experience than if you put on a set of VR glasses. It gives you a different experience than going to a Sphere where everything’s so big.”

While the Sphere comparison is unavoidable at first, Cosm doesn’t really consider the concert venue a competitor. They do such different things, even if both are enabled by incredible visual technology. “We both believe in an amazing human experience powered by technology, something that will wow you,” Terry says.

The non-sports experiences I sat through were just as impressive, including beautiful views of a performance of Cirque du Soleil’s “O” stage show. Maybe most impressive, though, was Cosm’s suite of tools that straddle between the worlds of entertainment and education.

First, Cosm brought me inside a true-life rendering of the Sistine Chapel. An engineer floated around the chapel using nothing but an Xbox controller; it felt like I was inside a drone flying around the room.

Cosm then showed me a bird’s-eye rendering of the building we were sitting in and its surroundings; think Google Maps, but on steroids. From there, the view zoomed out as we were transported several hundred miles to the LA Cosm facility, with every inch of earth between the two locations mapped on the screen. We then zoomed out even further to see the entire country, then the entire world, the entire galaxy, and the entire known universe.