In a technological advancement ordinarily held for sci-fi, Microsoft has collaborated with Warner Bros. to effectively store and recover a whole duplicate of the 1976 exemplary Superman: The Movie on a liner estimated bit of glass utilizing the Redmond company’s Project Silica storage solution.
Shown as a proof of idea, Project Silica utilizes “ultrafast laser optics and artificial intelligence to store data in quartz glass,” as clarified at Microsoft’s Ignite 2019 keynote.
As indicated by the company’s Innovation Stories blog, “A laser encodes data in glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations at various depths and angles.” A 2mm-thick bit of glass can hold around 100 layers of these gratings, otherwise called ‘voxels’ – what might be compared to pixels.
Polarized light is then gone through the glass, which is decoded and read back utilizing machine learning algorithms.
Super storage
Demonstrating nearly as indestructible as Superman himself, Microsoft’s hard silica glass endure being bubbled, scratched, scoured, demagnetized, microwaved, heated in a stove and more with not a solitary occasion of data loss recorded.
With an end goal to defend its immense library of historic movies (both celluloid and digital), radio shows, TV appears, animated shorts, dailies and that’s just the beginning, Warner Bros. drawn nearer Microsoft after learning of its glass-based capacity innovation.
“For years, they had searched for a storage technology that could last hundreds of years, withstand floods or solar flares and that doesn’t require being kept at a certain temperature or need constant refreshing,” said Jennifer Langston of Microsoft.
Preservation
This is especially significant with regards to the preservation of carefully shot movies, which are regularly documented by over and over duplicating and moving records crosswise over magnetic drives at regular intervals.
Furthermore, studios will likewise back up their movies by making a third authentic duplicate on simple film which is part into three shading segments and moved onto highly contrasting film negatives to dodge shading fading – a procedure that is as costly as it is convoluted.
“When we shoot something digitally — with zeros and ones representing the pixels on the screen — and print that to an analog medium called film, you destroy the original pixel values. And, sure, it looks pretty good, but it’s not reversible,” said Brad Collar, senior VP of Warner Bros.
Obviously, the Project Silica’s glass-based stockpiling is still in the verification of idea stage starting at the present moment, anyway Microsoft Azure’s main innovation official Mark Russinovich is certain about the innovation’s future. “I’m not saying all of the questions have been fully answered, but it looks like we’re now in a phase where we’re working on refinement and experimentation, rather asking the question ‘can we do it?’”
