It’s been so long I stopped paying attention. As a design student in the early 90’s I worked on concepts for a home media gateway (a “black box” which is effectively the same thing as Microsoft’s XBox 360), a holographic display device and holographic storage, so this news is a long time in coming and very welcome.

Computerworld has an article from last week titled “Turner Entertainment turns to holographic storage” that I’ve just now read. From the article:

Turner Entertainment Networks has its lenses focused on holographic storage for the future of storing and retrieving its movies, cartoons and commercial spots. The network giant has completed a test of the cutting-edge storage technology, which it said will soon move the company away from tape- and disk-based storage.

I wasn’t aware things were so far along. Now imagine the advantages of having holographic memory for virtual worlds. Not only can it grow more easily at less cost, the memory is random access – unlike current storage devices. It’s faster and more easily accessed. And for consumers, the ability to maintain larger caches means that distinctions between data types becomes less an issue as they can locally store more information. I’ve been wondering lately about an increased mix of 3D mesh data and parametric data in the Second Life virtual space. This is the kind of news that opens up some possibilities for the future; including privately-hosted sims.

Besides that, all the news stories of the new XBox 360, the $100 Laptop, and now this make me want to dig out my old sketches and do something creative. Very cool news.

via Wired