Consisting of 40 concerts from 29 September 2023 to 2 March 2024, the residency inaugurated the venue, with each show featuring a full performance of the group's 1991 album Achtung Baby along with a mix of other songs from their catalogue.

The band's creative team faced numerous challenges while developing the show, which included tailoring it to a venue that was still being built and would have brand-new technology, designing a suitable video playback system, and sharing the space with the crew for Darren Aronofsky's film Postcard from Earth.

To promote the residency, U2 released a Las Vegas-themed single on opening night called "Atomic City", and a temporary interactive exhibit was created for fans to visit at the Venetian resort that adjoins Sphere.

[11] The supporting Zoo TV Tour from 1992 to 1993 was a multimedia spectacle intended to instill sensory overload in the audience,[10][12] featuring dozens of video screens, Trabant automobiles in the lighting system, and a belly dancer.

"[14] According to U2's guitarist the Edge, the band first heard about Sphere in 2020 from friends involved with the project and through their creative team,[15] as they were interested in staying informed about emerging technologies for concerts, particularly live audio.

[18] From conversations with Shapiro and MSG Entertainment chief executive James L. Dolan, Bono learned about the immersive sound system that the German company Holoplot was designing for the venue.

Williams said he went to great lengths to explain to the band that they were "making an ocean liner not a dinghy", and that once they had decided on a direction, they would not be able to shift course quickly due to the production's heavy dependencies on video.

Williams soon settled on a three-act structure to the show:[42] a 21st century continuation of Zoo TV with overwhelming visuals; an acoustic segment to provide a break from them and focus on U2's performances; and a cinematic section that would turn attention to the outside world.

While the majority of it was produced in-house, artists such as Devlin, Marco Brambilla, and John Gerrard were commissioned to contribute video based on existing works of theirs, although they had to be recreated for Sphere's high-resolution screen.

[46] To produce a computer-generated recreation of the Las Vegas skyline, a team of 20 artists at the visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic worked for four months;[44][47] it was for a sequence in which Bono wanted the LED screen to depict the exterior surroundings of Sphere and create the illusion that the building had disappeared.

[49] For U2's show, Brambilla spent three-and-a-half months creating the sequence "King Size" that features a kaleidoscopic collage of 1,000 looped video clips depicting Elvis Presley and various Las Vegas iconography.

[50][51] Brambilla was asked to produce visuals that would instill sensory overload in the audience, and from conversations with Bono, he developed the themes of representing the death of Elvis, the birth of Las Vegas, and their parallels with the American Dream.

O'Herlihy served as sound engineer for the shows and spent the month acquiring hands-on experience with Holoplot's speaker system, which he said was completely different from the setup in the band's initial rehearsals.

[20] Speaking about the final sound design for the Sphere shows, Clayton felt that the group did not need to perform very loud, which in turn forced him to concentrate more on his bass playing to "lock in".

[64] The concerts remained unconfirmed until 12 February 2023, when a television advertisement aired during Super Bowl LVII to officially announce the residency as "U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at the Sphere".

In a joint statement, Bono, the Edge, and Clayton said, "It's going to take all we've got to approach the Sphere without our bandmate in the drum seat, but Larry has joined us in welcoming Bram van den Berg who is a force in his own right."

[102] Using beamforming capabilities, the Holoplot X1 speakers can digitally aim sound at specific spots in the audience and deliver a consistent volume to every seat in the venue, even over long distances.

[111] The lampposts stood 32 feet (9.8 m) tall,[112] and via controls from the lighting console,[57] could articulate from a vertical position to a 95-degree angle;[19] this allowed them to be lowered for cleaner sightlines of the LED screen at certain parts of the show.

[131] The second song, "The Fly", utilised a presentation similar to the one from the Zoo TV Tour, with a barrage of rapidly flashing words and aphorisms displaying on screen that recalled the work of Jenny Holzer.

At the song's midpoint, seven-segment digital letters and numbers in a variety of colors slowly filled up the entire screen from bottom to top, followed by the ceiling appearing to fall towards the audience.

[133] For "Even Better Than the Real Thing", Brambilla's kaleidoscopic video piece "King Size", comprising imagery of Elvis Presley and various Las Vegas iconography, played on the screen, scrolling from ceiling to floor to make the audience feel the false sensation that the stage was rising.

[157] On 28 September 2023, a pop-up exhibit called "Zoo Station: A U2:UV Experience" opened in the Venetian resort, comprising 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) of space across two floors for interactive displays related to U2.

[159] Created by Vibee in collaboration with the group's long-time creative director Gavin Friday,[160] the exhibit featured: a gallery of photography and video taken by the band's photographer Anton Corbijn; a pop-up shop of merchandise; the "Zoo TV Cinema", a theatre that screened a daily selection of five films curated by the Edge;[159] a replica of the Zoo TV Tour B-stage on which attendees could record an animated GIF;[133] a life-size German subway train; a vintage Trabant automobile[160] and an interactive "cyber-Trabant" that attendees could graffiti with digital spray paint; a photo booth; and the "Ultra Violet Lounge" and "Fly Bar".

He found the show to be "the apotheosis of a bigger-is-better ethos" the band has followed throughout their career, saying, "It's a cliche to say that U2 can achieve intimacy in the midst of the most ridiculous extravaganza, but nobody in rock history has done a better job of taking visual and aesthetic dynamics to extremes.

"[141] Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times said the show's "production sets a new benchmark for the interplay between humans and technology" and that U2 offered "the sheer obliterating pleasure of sensory overload: a barrage of eye-popping sights and sharply rendered sounds that finds a kind of ecstasy in submission".

While he believed U2 risked succumbing to irrelevancy by focusing on an album from their back catalogue, he posited that Achtung Baby may be "just a delivery device, in a post-pandemic age when live music feels more important than it has in decades, for a new way to think about performance".

[130] Pat Carty of Hot Press said, "For U2 to take their most painful, emotionally naked album to the altar of fake, a city that art and heart forgot, and then put it up on the largest display in history, and somehow succeed in making it even more intimate may just be the greatest trick they've ever pulled.

"[176] The residency appeared on Spin's list of the best concerts of 2023; writer Steve Appleford said, "No band was better suited than U2 to christen the Sphere", and that the "deeply emotional songs... were fueled by tension between U2's undiminished raw power and the magnificent and insane high-tech visuals all around them".

[208] The song "One" begins with a reverse angle showing the audience lighting up the venue with their phones, before switching to a closeup of Bono and then pulling back to a wide shot of the entire band.

[209] The moment, suggested by director Mark Pellington and taken from a rehearsal, was intended "to support Bono's onstage storytelling" and break the conceit that an actual live performance was taking place.