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Scientists unveiled new DVD technology on Thursday that stores data in five dimensions, making it possible to pack more than 2,000 movies onto a single disc.
A team of researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, used nanotechnology to boost the storage potential nearly 10,000-fold compared to standard DVDs, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
"We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc," said Min Gu, who lead the team.
Discs currently have three spatial dimensions. By using gold nanorods Gu and colleagues were able to add two additional dimensions, one based on the color spectrum, and the other on polarization.
Because nanoparticles react to light depending on their shape, it was possible to record information in a range of different color's wavelengths at the same physical location on the disc.
Current DVDs record in a single color wavelength using a laser.
The fifth dimension was made possible by polarization. When light waves were projected onto the disc, the direction of the electric field within the waves aligned with the gold nanorods.
"The polarization can be rotated 360 degrees," explained co-author James Chon. "We were, for example, able to record at zero degree polarization. Then on top of that, were able to record another layer of information at 90 degrees polarization, without them interfering with each other."
The researchers are still working out the speed at which the discs can be written on, and say that commercial production is at least five years off.
They have signed an agreement with Korea-based Samsung, one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers.
Last month, US technology giant General Electric said its researchers had developed a holographic disc which can store the equivalent of 100 standard DVDs.
Dual-layer Blu-ray discs hold the equivalent of 10 standard DVDs.
© Wire reports
24 Comments
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ronaldk
Holy crap! I have no idea what they are talking about above, but sounds good.
rgetty
Looks like the J-companies have their work cut out reverse engineering this one! and all those billions dunped into blue-ray , what a waste! They could always pull a coup and pay bigger licensing fees then Samsung. This is just another example of the that J-companies really don't create anything.
IchyaWarFare
Umm, they have been doing this for awhile, maybe not in the thousands, but if you been to PI, Thai or any other third world country, bam 100's of movies on DVD's. Not sure if it is legal, just saying its been done.
IchyaWarFare
Meant to say 100's of movies on 1 DVD.
desmosedici
Dr. Nakamatsu is frantically working on a plywood and/or cardboard prototype.
Den Den
Sounds great, but won't be available until we buy all the old technology first, then they will release it and make it all obsolete.
bamboohat
At approximately two hours per movie, that comes out to over five months of continuous pornography, 24/7, on one DVD. That is a bargain at any price.
stirfry
bamboo: 2 hours per ? only if you watch the ones with a plotline
terebiko
IchyaWarFare, are you saying 100's of movies that play when you put the dvd into a dvd player, or are you saying compressed movie data files which play on your computer? I think this new process is talking about 2000 standard dvds, not 2000 compressed data files. Not sure though, the way this is written. If this is true, sounds cool, but imagine what the cost of one dvd would be. Even if it were calculated at $1 per movie, we're talking $2000! GAK!
Dennis Bauer
2000 still not enough for me ;)
rtega
They will definitely find a new format so that one movie fits exactly on one such DVD. We will be at the same point as we were when the standard DVD was first introduced in 1997...
combinibento
This will be nice. We can finally do away with the "box sets" and be able to buy one DVD with every Scorcese film. One DVD with every Spielberg film. One DVD with all Kurosawa films. One DVD with each and every 1990's sumo match ever. One DVD with each and every SMAP concert. One DVD with each and every Iijima Ai movie ever made. Ph man, can't wait. Of course I wonder how much these will cost...
thedeath
a very good news for sony! and i hope samsung will put it in the market soon.
helloklitty
Me neither. I watch 2-3 pornos a day.
mareo2
So, by the time they can put these on the street (years), maybe we all just stream HD movies on our PCs conected to our 40" flat TVs or download movies on our notebooks or rent movies on the combiny on disposable memory format?
nath
The article doesn't mention the amount of storage on the disk. The current design stores 1.6 Terabytes which translates to 200 dual layer DVD movies at 8 GB per DVD. The new technology could theoretically store 10 TB or more depending on the number of polarisations of light used. Yay for Ozzie ingenuity! :)
Disillusioned
I'm studying with Swinburne and there are very few Ozzies enrolled, however, they are Australia's leading technology university.
Technology is swinging so fast it is impossible to keep up. It is only a matter of time before discs are completely gone and we are plugging our phones and 10TB flash drives into terminals to access everything.polarmalik
This is getting closer to the Great Secret - there are 7 Dimensions and each has identical world like ours and within each world there are 7 Dimensions also with identical world like ours and there are several such layers which make-up the Universe - each identical world is hidden from the other, sometime accidentally humans exit their Dimension and enter another....
ivarwind
Polarization may go through 360 degrees (180 actually), but for practical purposes I very much doubt using more than two directions (which stores one bit) is feasible. It would require more reading heads each of them with a more powerful laser. It all boils down to the nature of polarization, any given measurement can only test for one direction (and by exclusion the perpendicular), and the photons can not subsequently be tested for other directions of polarization.
Mathematically it may be termed a dimension, but it bears very little resemblance to the spatial ones usually associated with the word. (In this terminology, normal pictures are also five-dimensional, as each point has both a hue, a saturation and an intensity in addition to the two plane coordinates. With polarization you get six.)
But then, why would I want to pay for an additional 1992 movies, just to get the eight interesting ones that happen to be on the same disc - even at ten yen per title, it would be rather expensive...
Latenights
This sounds like another positive step on the inevitable path towards a complete overhaul of music, movie, picture and book licensing laws! The companies have to accept that the days of us suckers handing over cash for a piece of plastic containing a singe album or movie are dwindling away. With disc storage on this scale the only economical option will be to download material from the internet: if the license holders want their cut they'll have to make it fast, easy, of exceptionally high quality and CHEAP!
franz75
Latenights: that won't change. you'll still have the same soup on your piece of plastic.
DarkKnightNine
Well "rgetty" in the defense of Japanese companies, the blue laser was created by a Japanese engineer working in the research dept. of a Japanese company which is essentially the birth of blu-ray. Futhermore, most of the major formats we have used for the past three decades were created by Japanese companies e.g. Betamax, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, MD, CD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
bcbrownboy
This'll make it tough for the Narita sensors to screen my porn. But one little scratch will wipe out five years of movies!