There were ten days of location shooting in Iceland, where daylight lasted virtually 24 hours. Joseph Kosinski wanted to make a film that was very much based in daylight, considering that a lot of classic sci-fi movies like Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982) were shot in near darkness.
Joseph Kosinski and Claudio Miranda so disliked the extensive use of blue screen mattes in Tron: Legacy (2010) that for this film, they wanted to use real glass, mirrors and shiny surfaces for the glass tower set. The sky footage was projected on a 500x45' screen consisting of 21 monitors, and was filmed for three weeks from the summit of Haleakala volcano in Maui, Hawaii. The rooms with windows were lit by the light from those projections. The monitors took ten technicians several weeks to install and fine tune with floor-level rig support. In the end, the actors complimented the production team for that design to such an extent that Tom Cruise declared that the glass tower was one of his favorite film sets. This technology was eventually upgraded into the Volume, which has been used on every live action Star Wars show since The Mandalorian (2019) and on such films like The Batman (2022) and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022).
A full-sized bubble ship was created with doors that opened on their own, and Tom Cruise, a licensed pilot, provided input for the design of the controls.
The opening scene when the Universal logo appears offers the viewer a quick survey of how damaged the earth is in the film. The Tet is in orbit, as is the orbital escape module from the Odyssey. The oceans have receded, land masses have craters the size of entire countries, there are no polar ice caps, and even the word Universal appears worn and damaged.
The scene of Jack Harper on a precipice watering a small plant was filmed on Earl's Peak in Iceland, 2,000 feet high. The crew had to use helicopters to get people and equipment to the filming location.