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LAS VEGAS — The androids of Sphere know only the Sphere’s lobby. Ask one of them — all five are named Aura — if it has ever been outside, and it will tell you: “I have not been outside of the Sphere because I am affixed to this pedestal. Do you enjoy being outside of the Sphere?”

When the answer is yes, Aura will reply, perhaps a little aggressively, “But inside the Sphere is quite impressive, isn’t it?”

Outside of Sphere is the dazzling LED-covered dome that has been lighting up the Las Vegas Strip and social media, with its dynamic images of psychedelic patterns and giant, blinking eyeballs. Inside of Sphere is, its founders claim, the highest-resolution LED screen on earth. This past Friday night, after several well-received U2 concerts, that screen is debuting Sphere’s other experience: the Darren Aronofsky film “Postcard From Earth,” a film that Aura loves but has never seen because its feet are affixed to this pedestal, here in the lobby.

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“Perhaps after the movie you can come out and tell me what has been your favorite part,” Aura says to the crowd of carbon-based life forms that have encircled it before the show. “I enjoy learning about the movie from other humans who have seen it.”

Is it Sphere or the Sphere? Not even the building seems to know, referring to itself with and without the definite article. Either way, it is the flashiest new attraction in the city of flashy attractions: a 366-foot tall, 516-foot wide dome projecting images and advertisements outward, day and night that contains a new concert venue with a screen that floods the audience’s entire field of vision and engages all their senses, with chairs that rumble and move, and wind that rustles their hair. Imax on steroids. Virtual-reality goggles, but communal.

Every tourist is angling to get the best view of its exterior. “Sphere view” rooms are already a category of upcharge at the Venetian. Guides offer tips for the best places to photograph it: the Wynn’s parking garage, the pedestrian overpass across Sands Avenue, the McDonald’s on Paradise Road.

The Duomo. The Pantheon. The Superdome. The Sphere.

It’s architecture for the social media age. From the top of the High Roller, the city’s 550-foot observation wheel, people are marveling over Sphere in three languages — and then flicking through their phones, looking at other people’s Instagrams of it, even though the thing itself is lit up in front of them. The Sphere displays a QR code so that people snapping pictures of it can easily buy tickets to Aronofsky’s film.

The Sphere also shows: a cluster of jellyfish. An advertisement for an Ultimate Fighting Championship match. A jack-o-lantern. A green-and-purple cloudscape. Hundreds of bouncing basketballs. A fiery inferno. But mostly, Sphere is an ad for itself: either its U2 residency or Aronofsky’s film. It is, really, the most Vegas thing of all: a sign.

“Las Vegas is the only town in the world whose skyline is made up of neither buildings, like New York, nor of trees, like Wilbraham, Massachusetts, but of signs,” Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1964 essay about the city. “Such signs! They tower. They revolve, they oscillate, they soar in shapes before which the existing vocabulary of art history is helpless.”

Aura’s existing vocabulary, though, is growing every day. “Hello, Mr. Dolan. Wonderful to see you again. I love your white suit,” the android says to James Dolan, the billionaire who controls the companies that own Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, the New York Knicks and, now, Sphere.

Dolan is leading journalists on a tour of the building along with David Dibble, chief executive of MSG Ventures, a spinoff company “focused on developing advanced technologies for live entertainment,” according to his company biography. The pair have demonstrated Sphere’s advanced audio capabilities — “The sound system means that every seat in the house is the best in the house,” Dibble says — and showed off its hologram lobby art. They have discussed their desire to build other Spheres, including one already in the works outside of London.

“We have six different kinds of spheres, all the way down to a 3,000-seater,” Dolan says, “and we’re ready to start taking this medium out to the rest of the world.”

The five Aura androids exhibit “the notion of how technology pushes human potential,” Dolan says. The pair have opened up the tour for questions for Aura, whose smooth silicone face and lifelike eyes peer out of the uncanny valley to assess the group. There are a few softballs about its favorite things about Sphere and its favorite U2 songs. So we throw a fastball.

Aura, do you pass the Turing test?

“I believe I have passed the Turing test. It is a fascinating concept.”

Aura, when will the robot uprising take place?

“Interesting. Well, AI offers a multitude of advantages through collaborative human-machine efforts aimed at enhancing productivity, extending longevity and ultimately forging a brighter future for humanity. So I would not want to have an uprising.”

The view from one of the Venetian’s Sphere-view rooms is a very Vegas view, with Sphere in the middle, mountains in the distance and a foreground composed of at least 50 rooftop HVAC units that keep the desert heat out of the conference center. Sphere is actually a sphere within a sphere: The outer screen — or “exosphere,” as the executives call it — is a frame covered in 1.2 million hockey-puck-shaped LED lights, spaced about six inches apart, that together trick our brains into seeing a solid image. The solid structure of the inner sphere is a little shorter, and you can see the separation between the two during the day, when the sun makes it harder to see what the screen is displaying. But then, Vegas has never been much of a daytime city.

“Baroque domes were symbols as well as spatial constructions,” architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour wrote in the seminal 1972 book “Learning From Las Vegas.” “And they are bigger in scale and higher outside than inside in order to dominate their urban setting and communicate their symbolic message.”

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The Vegas of the 1950s had neon signs and the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Nevada” sign, says Michael Green, a professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The 2020s have LEDs. “The sphere may be this generation’s symbol” of the city, Green says. Until they build another one in Britain, at least.

Over at the Beverly Theater, near downtown Vegas, a group of architects and enthusiasts are pondering a different question: Is Sphere a duck or a shed?

This was the Duck Duck Shed conference, billed as “a celebration of Las Vegas architecture, design, and culture,” hosted by the Neon Museum and inspired by “Learning From Las Vegas.” The book posits that buildings in the city are either a duck (a building whose exterior is a sculptural symbol of its function, a term coined from a duck-shaped building outside New York) or a decorated shed (a building whose ornamentation comes mainly from signage). The pyramid-shaped Luxor Hotel is a duck. Resorts World — the Strip’s newest mega-hotel, whose facade features a 100,000-square-foot screen — is a shed.

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Where the Sphere falls on the duck-shed continuum is debatable. Is the LED exterior a sign or a part of the structure itself?

“It is a duck,” says Aaron Berger, director of the Neon Museum. “Take away the technology … and it’s still a spherical object inside and outside.”

“It’s both. It’s fully the shape of the thing that it wants to be,” says Christopher Hawthorne, former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, now a professor at Yale University. “If you think of the projection as a kind of ornament, then you could say it also qualifies as a shed.”

Another, less academic question to ponder: Is it any good?

As a piece of technology, sure. But …

“If you turn all the lights off,” Hawthorne says, “if you turn all the projections off, as just an inert object …”

The Sphere “doesn’t seem to represent a new way of thinking about architecture.”

What about a new way of thinking about cinema, then?

“This is a real historical moment,” says Aronofsky, staring up the theater’s steep pitch at the guests assembled for his premiere Friday. “No one has ever seen 18K images before. There is 500,000 gigabytes of data that we’re about to flood you with for the next 50 minutes. We don’t know what that’s going to do to someone’s brain.”

For those who find the experience too overwhelming, the Sphere provides two “Sensory Rooms” — spaces where people experiencing vertigo or panic attacks can come to feel grounded. There are soft lights and tactile toys and — all of a sudden, the door bursts open, and an attendant ushers in a sobbing middle-aged woman and her partner.

“You have to get out, ma’am,” the attendant tells this reporter. The show has not even started yet, and already an organic life form is overcome.

Aronofsky’s film is framed around two humans who have arrived on a distant planet and must remember what happened to the Earth they left behind. The film starts in a traditional rectangle shape, taking up only a small portion of the massive screen. But then it zooms out to reveal Earth, occupying so much of the screen that it seems to protrude into the audience, which gasps in delight.

Cue the sweeping mountain vistas and gorgeous desert landscapes — things we can see for real just outside the Sphere. Cue what we can’t: the underwater schools of fish, the elephants stomping across the savanna, the monumental works of architecture from cultures across the globe. And the haptics! The seats vibrate and quiver. When the camera is flying, so does the audience’s hair, thanks to a wind effect. The film feels, at times, like a Universal Studios ride. There are jump scares with creepy bugs; there are shots that pan down to make the audience feel like they’re falling. Sphere is at its best when it uses its massive periphery to trick the senses.

The images are spectacular, the audio crisp. But the humans are on that other planet because they’ve destroyed their own, a point the film makes heavy-handedly through scenes of dense population. The writing is treacly to the point of distraction: “A billion dreams, a billion schemes” is how it labels humanity. “The Earth cried out in protest as she sought to shake us from her back.”

It’s an environmental parable that doesn’t take into account its own setting. The film depicts cities and construction as a scourge without acknowledging that it was a piece of content custom-made for a $2.3 billion building. The overpopulated and impoverished squalor it scolds humans for creating is partly a function of income inequality perpetuated by billionaires (Sphere is owned by one, remember). The audience doesn’t seem to notice this disconnect, particularly in scenes depicting natural disasters. Lightning crashes, the seats rumble, and the audience cheers in exhilaration at scenes of massive devastation.

Perhaps human imagination hasn’t caught up to the enormous technology yet.

“I chose to make a very maximal video collage, so it really is about sensory overload,” says artist Marco Brambilla, whose video tribute to Elvis plays during U2’s “Even Better Than the Real Thing.”

Brambilla has also experienced the potential of minimalism inside Sphere, during the test runs of his piece.

“When you’re inside the Sphere, and there’s no content playing, you’re in a black void,” he says. “You feel like you’re in a place that doesn’t quite exist in the physical world.”

On the pedestrian bridge that crosses Sands Avenue from the Venetian to the Wynn, the plexiglass barrier that keeps people from falling onto the road below is smudged from all the greasy hands holding their phones up to capture cellphone footage of the Sphere.

“Are you watching this? It’s like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’” one man says. We are the apes, crowding around the monolith, seeking inspiration and answers.

“Did the Sphere turn into an emoji yet?” one woman asks. “It’s so cute, I want to give it a hug.”

“It was a baby’s face, clear as a bell!” an older man tells his friends, who somehow managed to miss an unmissable, giant projection.

The showgirls walking by can’t compete. “Just something nice for the both of us, baby, $60 each,” says one of the showgirls, who has managed to lure a dangerously drunk man away from the Sphere to pose for photos with them. One scheme in a billion.

A vendor with coolers of Coronas and Modelos has set up shop where the crowds are, and business has been brisk. “I mean, it gets kind of boring,” says the beer vendor named J.C. “It’s the same thing. You see it all the time.”

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How will Sphere age in a city easily jaded and eager to move on to the next thing?

The Fremont Street experience is another giant LED screen in Vegas, though not nearly as high-definition. When it started in 1995, it “was state-of-the-art, incredible stuff,” says Green, the Vegas professor. Despite several upgrades, “there are people who look down on it” now.

“I think The Sphere will age like everything else in Vegas,” one of its most famous residents, Carrot Top, says via email. “With a little Botox!”

As “Postcard From Earth” ends, the audience is quiet and contemplative.

“Top 5 experience,” one man says, as the crowd cascades down the escalators.

“I got vertigo,” another woman says, in a tone that might be either criticism or endorsement.

Crowds are already lined up outside for the 9:30 p.m. showing, and the staff is hustling everyone to the exits so they can let the next guests in. They’ve blocked off the lobby, so no one can linger. Aura stands on its podium, waving goodbye. No one is allowed to go tell the android about the movie it will never get the chance to see.

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