Sphere to Unveil Hologram of Dana White, Who Vows Never to Stage UFC There Again

Posted on: September 12, 2024, 03:38h. 

Last updated on: September 12, 2024, 05:39h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Las Vegas Myths.

A hologram of UFC CEO Dana White will be unveiled on Saturday night at the Las Vegas venue where the MMA icon has vowed never to stage another event again.

This is definitely not a real hologram of Dana White’s back, though we don’t necessarily understand what a “real hologram” is. Please stop being so impressed with our command of AI. (Image: Microsoft Designer)

Digi-Dana won’t be on permanent display inside the Las Vegas Sphere, however. And that’s because the hologram was commissioned by UFC, not the Sphere itself. So it will be powered down and removed immediately following UFC 306’s 10 “Riyadh Season Noche” bouts.

Joining White’s hologram in the Sphere’s Aura Gallery — that creepy hall where robots with lifelike expressions answer questions but ignore anyone trying to get fresh with them — will be holograms of your “favorite fighters” for “an unprecedented selfie experience.”

This is according to a press release from Proto Hologram that does not disclose which fighters will be hologrammed but says they will all be rendered in “life-size, volumetric 4K” without explaining what that is.

David Nussbaum, CEO of Proto Hologram, shows the real Dana White how the fake Dana White will appear. (Image: Facebook/Proto Hologram)

“We’re absolutely fired up to see Proto holograms at  Sphere for the first time ever at Noche UFC!” enthused David Nussbaum, CEO of LA-based Proto Inc., with standard press release enthusiasm.

Ridiculously, the company expected us to transform its rice paper-thin press release into a story without even furnishing a photo of what its Dana White hologram looks like.

“I understand completely but they are holding back any visuals on it,” the PR rep emailed us.

So we summoned an image from the sinister wizards of dark-web machine learning. But alas, our free program, Microsoft Designer, is a piece of garbage forbidden from generating the faces of celebrities.

But Dana White’s back looks incredibly realistic, don’t you think? There’s no way the real fake Dana White’s back will look any better than ours, which you got to see for free instead of $5,000.

And you totally didn’t even notice that errant white beard, did you?

As we reported yesterday, production costs for UFC 306 were initially supposed to be $8 million, an astronomical figure that instigated White to charge record-setting face values of up to $23K per ticket. But production costs have now reportedly ballooned to $20 million, while reseller ticket prices have plummeted to a sixth of their face value and are still plummeting.

Of course, since most modern holograms talk, ours would say, as the real Dana White reportedly did to MMA journalist John Morgan recently: “We’re not ever doing an event at the Sphere again.”