It’s been a while since I shipped a client project with Hyperlaunch, so I’m super excited to release the new Space Baby app for U2. I’m even more excited to be able to say that I’m the first developer in the world to develop an app integration with The Sphere.

What is it?

It’s a companion app for U2’s residence at the Sphere. Whenever U2 content is playing on the “exosphere”, the app goes into “broadcast mode”, allowing fans to tune in and listen to the audio accompaniment. This includes the Space Baby speaking, so I had a fair bit of technical wrangling to make sure it’s millisecond accurate - essentially pre-downloading the entire clip and then seeking to the right point, to avoid latency issues with streaming.

Outside of broadcasts, there’s an ambient soundtrack produced by Brian Eno.

When a broadcast starts, we recieve a notification from the Sphere’s internal tooling to update the currently playing clip - and my stack then pushes a socket to all active users to update the state in real time.

Built with…

• Astro for build
• Pusher for web sockets
• Mux for streaming the ambient soundtrack
• Turso for persisting the Sphere notifications
• React and Tailwind for UI
• Vercel for CI and infra

You can read the full case-study over at Hyperlaunch.