Microsoft freakin' stored the 1978 Superman movie on a piece of glass

Microsoft showed off an impressive method of information storage today at its Ignite 2022 briefing. Microsoft worked with Warner Bros. to store and think the entirety of the 1978 "Superman" moving-picture show on a piece of drinking glass. Simply equally impressive is the size of the glass; at 75 by 75 by 2 millimeters thick, the glass disk is "roughly the size of a drink coaster," Microsoft says.

This is a proof of concept for "Project Silica," a project at Microsoft to use a combination of laser optics and AI to store information in quartz glass. "A light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation encodes data in glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations at diverse depths and angles," Microsoft said in a blog post. "Motorcar learning algorithms read the information back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized lite shines through the glass."

Microsoft says Warner Bros. initially approached them to come up up with new technologies to effectively store its library of films in a non-destructive manner. The goal was to find a storage method that could "concluding hundreds of years," withstanding threats like floods and solar flares. Co-ordinate to Microsoft, the silica glass tin survive, with data intact, through being boiled in water, baked, microwaved, demagnetized, and more than.

Beyond films, Microsoft hopes that Project Silica tin work every bit a potential storage method for the deject, ultimately driving down the cost of long-term storage. "Ane big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive bike of moving and rewriting information to the next generation," said Ant Rowstron, a paertner debuty lab managing director of Microsoft Inquiry Cambridge. "We actually want something you tin can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget almost until you demand it."

For now, Warner Bros. sees Projection Silica as a potentially effective way for preserving its vast itemize of films and television. "If we tin take the digital representation of those pixels and put it on a medium like silica and read it dorsum off exactly as information technology was when information technology came out of the camera, nosotros've done our preservation task to the very best of our ability. That's what I love most this," said Brad Collar, Warner Bros. senior vice president of global athenaeum and media engineering.

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