Rainbow Versatile Disk – Future Storage device

The whole world is moving towards the small size and high capacity storage devices. But instead of inventing a new storage device for our future needs, there is a new technique to store enormous amount of data in nowhere else, but a paper. You can store an awesome amount of data about 250 GB of data in just a sheet of A4 paper. This new technology is the ‘Rainbow‘. Rainbow technology is the future storage technology and it is currently in its developmental stage. So, how it is done? Read more to find it out!

Rainbow Versatile Disk

What’s behind it?

This technology uses geometric shapes to store data instead of the usual digital format of 0′s and 1′s. The geometric shapes used to store data also included Textures and Diagrams.

Development

Mr. Sainul Abideen, a Computer Applications  student  of  MES  college of  Engineering – Kerala, India  has designed this Rainbow technology for future storage needs. His design combines various techniques to create an unique one.

Storing the data as geometric shapes, we can compress data in 450 sheets of plain text into a 1 inch square. Also. the bits and bytes of a 45 second audio clip can also be compressed on to a A4 sheet. Based on the sampling frequency, depth of bit and compression of audio, the size of the 45 second audio clip can vary from few kilo bytes to few mega bytes of data.

The highly advantageous thing with the Rainbow Technology is that, the same principle can be extended up to 256 GB of data by using specific materials and devices.

Rainbow Versatile Disc (RVD)

Data from 90 GB to 450 GB can be stored in an RVD, which is 131 times the capacity of a normal CD. RVD supports the data in any format like movie files, MP3 files, picture files, data files et cetra. Special drives need to be developed in order to support RVDs. A method called “Vertical Lining” is applied in RVD.

How it’s done?

In Rainbow technology, the data in any format termed ‘rainbow format’ has been designed in such a way that it can be printed out in the form of images. The data is converted to rainbow format on the basis of Rainbow Algorithm. Trigonometric forms like circle or square, certain color combinations and certain other forms are being used. Each trigonometric form, color combination represents a complete pattern.

Most modern technologies like image processing, pattern matching, etc. are used for the purpose. The data which gets converted into an image form is then printed on paper or any other thing. This is how the data storage is made possible. When the steps are reversed, the rainbow picture is converted into data.

This is how it’s done!

Although environmental light differences and color shading is a problem, it can be overcome up to a certain extent by using efficient mapping function. Each rainbow format contains a header, body, footer, parity, Rainbow boundary mapper, etc. Header contains the measurement of the rainbow picture, the algorithm that is being used, etc. It also contains an efficiently-designed error checking system.

Pros

• CDs are made using Poly Carbonate which costs about Rs. 400 to Rs. 450 per kilogram and 16 Grams of Poly Carbonate is needed to make a CD. But the RVD which offers 131 times storage capacity than the CD can be made from paper.
• It is highly portable and bio-disposable.

Cons

• Since it is made of paper, it can be easily destroyed.
• A scanner can reliably distinguish  256 unique colors and the scanner which can distinguish 1,440,000 colors is costly.

Final Words…

Technologies like these will lure us more towards it. In future, we will see RVD’s replacing DVD’s and Blu Ray Disks as the major future storage device. To do that, it has to overcome it’s shortcomings. Let’s hope this environment friendly technology comes into our everyday computing life.

Dear Readers! Let us know your thoughts about Rainbow Versatile Disks, the future storage device through the comments!

This is a guest post by Navin. He is a student of Information Technology. He loves computers and learns more about future technologies. If you wish to write for SparkWiz, kindly check our guidelines for Guest post and Join Us!