FAIRFIELD, CT — General Electric on Monday announced a technological breakthrough it says will allow standard-sized discs to hold content equivalent to the data contained on 100 DVDs.Although only a laboratory success at present, G.E. said it feels certain the process can be refined until actual products can be mass-produced at affordable prices. Optical storage experts hailed the development as having potential across a broad range of applications.
The breakthrough is in the area of holographic storage. According to G.E. researchers, the new optical storage technique encodes light patterns on light-sensitive material in a much denser way than conventional, laser-based optical storage and Blu-ray Discs. Visualize tiny prismatic mirrors packed with 1s and 0s that can be reassembled into 3D objects on-demand.
Although holographic technology has been the focus of theory and conjecture since the 1960s, most of the advances in the field have been made in supporting areas like materials, optics and applied physics. Later this year, InPhase Technologies plans to introduce a high-dollar system of computers and expensive discs for high-end holographic applications like movie production and medical imaging.
Until G.E.’s announcement, not many people had investigated consumer applications for the technology, believing it to be beyond the financial reach of average users. In the investigative stage since 2003, G.E. took the research in another direction, one its scientists call “microholographic storage.”
Microholograms are smaller and less complex than the type InPhase will introduce in its equipment, but they presented big challenges to G.E.’s research team. Chief among the challenges was figuring out what materials and procedures would allow the tiny mirror-like images to reflect enough light to make their data retrievable.
That breakthrough came recently with the discovery of a way to increase the holograms’ reflectivity by 200-percent, putting the images in the bottom range of light reflections readable by Blu-ray players.
That’s significant, because it means G.E.’s holgrams can be read by contemporary CD, DVD and Blu-ray machines.
“If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology,” Bert Hesselink, a professor at Stanford and an expert in the field, told The New York Times.
