Small but mighty: NTT's card holds a gig of data.
The leap from VHS to DVD is all but over, with Blockbuster pulling in more revenue from discs than from the clunky cassettes of yore. But if Japan's NTT has anything to say about it, the heyday of the DVD - and the CD, for that matter - is about to end. The research arm of the communications giant has developed a cheap, postage stamp-sized alternative, dubbed Info-MICA. NTT is betting that Hollywood will be particularly keen on the all-plastic medium, because Info-MICAs are hard to pirate.
NTT unveiled its 1-gigabyte prototype earlier this year, and the first commercial versions are slated to hit the market in 2005. The see-through cards are manufactured using thin-film holography: Digital data is encoded into a two-dimensional image, a computer converts the image into a hologram, and lasers etch the hologram onto the card. The result is about 100 minute layers with varying refractive properties. Magnified several hundred times, the patterns etched into the layers look a bit like the dots and dashes of Morse code.
An Info-MICA drive reads this data with intermittent light pulses. This differs from CDs and DVDs in two major ways: Info-MICA cards don't spin, and their drives don't require an always-on laser. These innovations drastically reduce power consumption, which makes Info-MICA ideal for mobile devices. The drives will have to shrink first, though. The prototype is the size of a cell phone, and NTT aims to make it fit inside handsets.
Hideki Sakamoto, spokesperson for NTT's Info-MICA research team, acknowledges that the holography equipment needed to create the cards is relatively expensive, but he says the per-card production price should be about the same as that of a commercial CD. "Manufacturing Info-MICA is like making paper money," he says. The plastic is imprinted in a large sheet that gets sliced into individual cards.
The first planned application for Info-MICA is fairly humdrum: replacing ROM chips in slot machines and electronic dictionaries. But the company's long-term aspirations are much grander. NTT foresees Info-MICAs competing with audio CDs, especially as all-in-one handheld devices gain popularity. PDAs with Info-MICA slots, for example, could double as portable music players. The medium is small enough not to be a nuisance - a handful of the cards feels as light as a feather - and the laser-pulse readers are battery-friendly. NTT intends to up the memory to 10 gigabytes, big enough to store movies.
And can you say recyclable? AOL, for one, could blunt a lot of environmental criticism by choosing Info-MICAs over CDs for its ubiquitous "1,000 Hours of Free Service!" throwaways. The eco-friendly spin also makes them a good candidate for electronic news readers - a user could plug the day's New York Times card into a handheld, then toss it into a recycling bin that night.
NTT is shopping the technology to music labels, because the cards are tough to duplicate illicitly. So far, potential pirates have no access to thin-film holography equipment, and very few people possess the technical expertise necessary to convert two-dimensional images into computer-generated holograms. NTT also has plans to assign each Info-MICA a unique ID number to make it simpatico with any digital rights management schemes that Hollywood might develop. (Of course, anyone with an audio-out jack could still make analog copies.)
Info-MICA's biggest problem, though, isn't technical. NTT has already locked up most of the relevant patents. Sony did the same thing with the MiniDisc in 1992, and that technology - as good as it is - hasn't exactly pushed other media out of the market.
Brendan I. Koerner (koerner@newamerica.net) is a contributing editor at Wired.START
The Shoe With the 20-MHz Brain
Psssst. Get Microsoft Office. Cheap.
The Little Card That Could
How Big Pharma Finds Its Next Fix
The Racer's Edge: Backseat Driving at 200 mph
