(Column) - It wasn’t too long ago when Holographic storage was the stuff legends were made off. It discussed how a single DVD sized disc would be able to hold over 1TB of data. Well, we were apparently all wrong. Holographic display is scheduled to debut sometime in 2006 and this poses a host of interesting questions.

The first one that springs to mind is - how will companies fighting over Blu-Ray and HD DVD react to this? The furious turf war had perhaps not accounted for a new standard. Now that we have a new standard that features a completely new technology and gives you much more storage capacity that it just might be worth the effort to upgrade. Also, upgrading should be treated as a non-issue in light of the fact that if you adopt Blu-Ray, you will need to do a hardware upgrade anyways. What makes upgrading to Blu-Ray any less difficult than this?

Well, a number of things. First and foremost is the cost effectiveness aspect of the upgrade. Up until now, one of the main reasons behind this technology not being successful was the prohibitively high cost of manufacturing, which obviously increased the final cost of an upgrade.

Moreover, if company x decided to offer support for this technology, its hardware will need to go through significant changes, since it’s not just a laser with a shorter wavelength, but an entirely new way of storing data. I am particularly interested in finding out what this means for gaming consoles, and hopefully I’ll hear back from our contacts soon.

Since the disc has such high capacity, we could harness the capabilities and create hard disks that will make 1TB of data capacity on discs look like nothing in comparison. An interesting possibility cropping into my head is, let’s say within the next year, we are able to get the full 1TB of storage on a disc, then, a mini-disc could obviously hold, say, 100GB. After that, put in a rewritable variety into a portable media player and you have something that holds 25 times the data than Apple’s iPod Nano in a thinner format. Merge this technology with holographic projection and you have an MP3 player as small as MobiBLU's DAH-1500i with 100GB of storage capacity. Sure, the battery lifespan might be terrible, but the sheer fact of a proof-of-concept product is interesting nonetheless.

Next