"The songs have been decided early, to allow Willie Williams and his team to build the accompaniment for the songs. This includes video footage, but may also incorporate other elements. Unlike most venues, there’s added elements to play with at the Sphere. The venue’s haptic seats make up 10,000 of the 17,600 seats in the venue, and allow for vibration, shifting the attendees, and more. There are also environmental effects possible as well including hot and cold air, wind, and even scent. Additionally each seat also functions as a speaker.
Willie has been at work playing with these new toys since last August. Surely that’s one of the longest lead times to any U2 show for developing material. He’s been working in a smaller scale venue developing video and other effects. Looking forward to see how these special effects get used.
Achtung Baby provided a good head start for video creation, as they knew early on that those songs would all appear in the show. Others we’ve been told are being worked on? “Walk On”,
“Dirty Day” and 
“Your Song Saved My Life” have all been teased. And we do expect from things shared with us to see the Sphere light up in red all around at another point in the show. We’ve also been told that recent video shoot, recreating U2’s original video locations for “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, were being “shot for the Sphere”, although it wasn’t confirmed that it was for U2.
Asked in May about what else they might play, the topic of Zooropa also came up in Rolling Stone magazine, with The Edge sharing, “Opening night comes just a few months after the 30th anniversary of Zooropa. I think there will be some nods to Zooropa. In our minds, the tours [for Achtung Baby and Zooropa] blended into one. But I think Achtung Baby will be the main focus.” Asked about the possibility of including “Numb”, The Edge shares, “That has been discussed. But it’s by no means sure if we’ll go there. We’ll see.”
Will they be playing different material night to night? The Edge shares, “Unfortunately, because of the amount of time and expense in creating some of these set pieces visually, it’s quite hard to be as quick on our feet and spontaneous as we might have been on other tours. But we still are determined that there will be sections of the show that will be open to spontaneity, and it will change from night to night. I don’t think anyone in the band will want to see the show on train tracks.”
Let the discussion begin…what other tracks do you expect to see in the Sphere? It’s still early yet, so who knows where the band will end up before September 29.
