GE Adventure

Despite going through what must be hundreds of CDs in my day, I never actually understood how they worked until we got a tour of what GE was up to in their holographic storage department. I generally knew that CDs worked liked records, replacing pits for groves and a laser for a needle, but that’s where my understanding ended. (Well, that’s not entirely true, I knew that when the laser spun the CD it checked to see if there was a pit and then it registered it as either a 1 or a 0 … Oh man, I hope all that’s right.)

Anyhow, when we met with Brian Lawrence he walked us through his work. As part of his explanation, he gave us a quick summary of the history of physical media.

From the Edison Blue Amber Record (cylindrical) …

To a shape much more familiar (and with Edison’s face no less)

To CDs and DVDs (not pictured … I’m assuming you all know what it looks like) and finally to holographic media (which you’ll notice looks pretty much exactly like a CD/DVD (minus the fact this one is transparent).

So … That’s all a long way of getting to the point, which is how these things work. Just like a CD/DVD this thing bounces a laser (green or blue) off a disc like the one Benjamin is holding above. It then measures the amount of light that bounces back which is indicative of the signal (1 or 0). What’s cool about these discs over DVDs is just how deep you can read into the disc. By moving the lens up and down you can adjust for depth, thereby allowing the disc to hold massive amounts more than even a Blu Ray (which can store around 50 gigabytes I believe). Actually, I’ll just let GE explain:

By leveraging 50 years of polycarbonate research, GE scientists are developing specialized polycarbonate materials that chemically change when bombarded by a specific type of laser to “write” material onto the “disc.” Another laser is able to “read” those chemical changes in the material to retrieve the data that has been stored. The major benefit of this approach is being able to use the entire volume of the material instead of being limited only to the visible surface area. If you would apply this new technology to a disc the size of a DVD, you could fit 200 times more data on a DVD. The other advantage is a huge increase in data retrieval speed through parallel reading schemes.

So yeah, it’s pretty rad (though it won’t be out for a few years … slated for 2012 according to this Technology Review article).