A note came in today from a friend I've known even longer than my saintly wife. "How does this fit into Moore's Law?" he asked.
The link was to a story about a holographic storage system being marketed by Optware of Japan. It's called a Holographic Virtual Card (HVC) and claims to store 30 Gigabytes on $1 worth of media. (That's the Optware reader to the right, from a 2004 GearBits article promising commercialization in 2005.)
The kicker is that readers will cost $2.000 and read-write devices may cost five times more. Optware has promised standard kit by the end of next year.
All this related to what my book calls Moore's Law of Optical Storage. Instead of storing data on a fairly flat substrate, the Optware design uses all three dimensions. Think of the storage medium as a cube rather than a circle.
There's a long way to go before this threatens the CDs we're used to. Right now, however, the high price of the readers may be an advantage, making this perfect for applications like physical security.
Imagine the depth of personal knowledge that could be input on a 30 GByte substrate for an entry badge. Connect that to a variety of biometric readers so the bad guys can't hide their identities behind, say, phony fingerprints or contact lenses. Add a human guard to the mix and your entry portal could be pretty darned secure (for a time).
But the best news here may be this, the fact that there's competition in this space from Inphase Technologies, a spin-off of Bell Labs. They're looking at issues like the speed of data transfer, issues that could make holograms an alternative for the archiving of Web data.
The Moore's Law process is really pretty straightforward:
The trick is that each stage of the process you have to create valuable applications, applications that squeeze value and money from the market that's needed to keep the process going. (Picture from a 2003 story on this in Business 2.0.)
At the current stage of its development you're talking about vertical applications, specialized systems for which the high cost of readers (or read-write devices) represents an advantage. That can help scale-up production, get the costs down, at which point you start trying to gain allies, creating a network of companies that can move forward with the technology. Optware has already done this by forming the HVD Forum -- HVD stands for Holographic Versatile Disk.
Most publicity about HVD concentrates on the old CD format, noting that an HVD the size of a CD would hold 1 terabyte of data. My friend's article points to something different, namely that the underlying technology doesn't have to be a disk at all.
Now there's one big problem with HVD. In order to reach standardization it really has to be an agreed-upon standard, as CDs and DVDs are agreed-upon standards. Magnetic hard drives don't have to meet such tight standards. You can make them in any shape or size, and innovation in that area has, through this decade, been exceeding that in the optical world as a result.
Can you get the kind of read-write capability out of a holographic cube that you can out of a spinning magnetic disk? That's where OptWare ought to be putting its own research dollars. Because if it can, and if it can get read-write device prices down to the hundreds of dollars rather than the thousands they're at currently, then you really have somehing, a Moore's Law device that is bureaucracy-independent.