Machine Learning Seminar Series Fall 2025 | Wizard of Oz: An Experiential Time Machine powered by Google AI now Playing at the Las Vegas Sphere
All Seminars Held on Tuesdays 12pm - 1pm
Abstract: In the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy travels from Kansas to Oz. Using the wizardry of Google AI, Dorothy and her friends now are visiting the Sphere in Las Vegas for an immersive and experiential retelling of their story!
In partnership with Sphere Inc., Warner Bros. Magnopus, teams from GDM and Google Cloud have reimagined "The Wizard of Oz" as an immersive experience for the Sphere, an enormous (yes) sphere-shaped venue that seats more than 17,000 people. A traditional movie experience it is not.
In this talk, I will present details of this project, first announced at Google Cloud Next '25, The goal was to use AI to augment the work of VFX artists, elevating the visual content of the 1939 classic for Sphere's one-of-a-kind display all while honoring the original story. To tackle the unique challenges of enhancing and scaling this classic film for the world's largest screen, our teams developed new AI capabilities, including:
- Veo driven fine-tuning for character performance to ensure that beloved characters' movements remained authentic.
- AI-powered super-resolution to upscale classic footage to an unprecedented scale.
- Outpainting to extend characters and foreground elements beyond the boundary of the original film, which is limited in scale and aspect ratio.
Google teams developed novel AI techniques, to bring a classic film from a cinematic to an experiential medium and provided technologies to artists to create a truly special 75 minute movie + experience through care and commitment to craft, storytelling, and authenticity. This project involved working with over a thousand artists, researchers and engineers to create a new form of entertainment and a landmark effort in the history of entertainment that will be running in Las Vegas for a long time.
More details
- Google Cloud Blog | Google Keyword Blog
- Behind the scenes (curtain): The preview from Cloud Next '25.
- Can I see it? Yes! Get your tickets here.