New 1TB discs could become the new standard for games, TV, and movies.
Today Sony in partnership with Tohoku University announced they have developed a new laser technology that will allow them to encode discs with twenty five times the data of any standard Blu-ray disc, with a total capacity of 1TB on a single disc.
The all-semiconductor laser technology uses a extremely condensed wavelength of 405 nanometers and generates high-powered optical pulses at three picoseconds (three-trillionths of a second). The nitty gritty technical details aside, this ultimately could mean big things for a next generation disc format, particular for high definition films and television and gaming.
Currently a standard dual-layer Blu-ray disc provide 50GBs of maximum data capacity, which as it stands, is rarely ever reached by games or movies. However, with up to 1TBs of data at their disposal, publishers could pack multiple titles on a single disc. With that much space, as The Examiner reports, studios could pack up to fifty HD films onto a single disc or entire seasons of television series.
The potential applications for games are also pretty substantial; with more space comes more capacity for more elaborate graphics, longer games, uncompressed multi-channel audio, more elaborate gameplay, or as we mentioned with movies and television, multiple games on a single disc.
While Sony did not announce any clear cut plans for the technology in terms of implementation on a consumer level, they did note that there are "high expectations" for the new laser system and that it could be particularly valuable in reducing the size of devices due to it's smaller light source.
All things considered, it seems fairly obvious that it will be years before this technology becomes commercially available, let alone adopted as a standard, but when the time comes it could lead to some pretty interesting developments in high-fidelity, high-capacity disc-based media.
Source: IGN
