Cnet has an intresting story about the follow up of the DVD. This new technology is based on the concept that data is stored as patterns of light in three dimensions instead of as 0s and 1s on a flat surface and is called holographic storage.
With this technology it should be possible to put 2 GB of data on the an area of the size of a poststamp, a disc with the size of a DVD, could hold 20 movies instead of one. The technology is however very complicated and altough prototypes excist, it's certainly not ready for the consumer market.
However the company InPhase is a step ahead and brings Tapestry, that might be the next generation storage technology:
A removable, random-access, environmentally stable write-once media, the Tapestry disc is about the same size as a CD, but it stores 100GB of data--enough for 20 full-length movies or 7.5 hours of compressed high-definition video. InPhase showed Tapestry to drive manufacturers at last year's Comdex, but the demo in April marked the first time that end users, mostly from movie studios and high-end digital effects companies, got to see it. |
The lucky guests were invited to pick a 30-second audio clip and a 30-second video clip and watch them be recorded onto a 1-inch-square piece of Tapestry media. (The components were engineered in an oversized, clear case so that visitors could see the lasers working.) They also saw the holographs themselves--a matrix of light and dark--projected onto a PC monitor as the clip was recorded.
Witnesses to the demo said they were impressed by what they saw.
"It's the first implementation that I've seen that came anywhere close to what it's going to be," said Paul K. Miller, director of the Digital Cinema Lab for the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California.
"It's an interesting accomplishment, considering how small the media is. They showed what I assume is a very early prototype. They took some material and recorded it on a little chip of photosensitive material; it must have been an inch, an inch and a quarter."
It's always exciting to see new technologies appear and it is good to see we probably will be able to store TerraBytes of data in the future at home, but there is just one thing that bothers me: I want it now !
Source: Cnet.com
