Microsoft Stores Warner Bros. 'Superman' Movie on a Glass

Microsoft recently collaborated with Warner Bros. to shop the 1978 iconic "Superman" movie on a piece of glass made of quartz as role of Project Silica, Microsoft's research projection.

The glass measures vii.5 cm x 7.5 cm with two-millimeter thickness and stores 75.half-dozen GB of information along with error redundancy codes. Laser is used to encode data in the glass past creating "3D nanoscale grating layers and deformations at diverse depths and angles". The encoded data is then read by Motorcar learning algorithms to decode them back to images and patterns.

In a weblog post, Microsoft says their hard silica drinking glass can withstand hot water. It can also hold out against being microwaved, flooded, scoured, and demagnetized. Incredible, I would say.

"Storing the whole 'Superman' flick in glass and being able to read information technology out successfully is a major milestone. I'm not proverb all of the questions have been fully answered, but it looks similar we're at present in a phase where we're working on refinement and experimentation, rather asking the question 'tin we do it?'", says Mark Russinovich, Azure'southward master technology officeholder.

Every bit per Microsoft's blog, Warner Bros. approached Microsoft to preserve its vast library later getting to know most Project Silica. The American entertainment company has been searching for a storage technology that would not suffer from deposition.

"That had always been our beacon of hope for what we believed would exist possible one solar day, so when we learned that Microsoft had developed this glass-based applied science, we wanted to bear witness it out," said Warner Bros. Primary Technology Officer Vicky Colf.

Ant Rowstron, a lab managing director of Microsoft Research Cambridge who worked closely with University of Southampton on Project Silica says that this technology is entirely meant to be a permanent storage utility rather than being a new alternative to household cassette tapes or deejay drives.