Enter the Rainbow Versatile Disc (RVD)

While the war of the next-gen DVD worlds rages on between Blu-ray and HD-DVD (and up till some time ago, EVDs), the future of digital storage may not lie in plastic discs at all.

A student from Kerala has developed a new technology by which extremely large amounts of data can be stored on simple, regular paper. It works along the lines of barcodes, but instead of thick and thin bars, Sainul Abideen’s 'Rainbow Technology' uses various shapes in various sizes and colors, thus giving it the name.

Sainul has already demonstrated the technology in his college, during which a 45-second movie clip was played back from the regular paper using Rainbow Technology.

The advantage of the technology—other than the high capacity that one RVD provides (between 90 to 450GB)–the discs are manufactured from paper, which makes them more environmentally friendly, and also a whole lot cheaper.

The uses for the Rainbow Technology are vast. Magazines that currently bundle CDs or DVDs will only need to 'print' the data on one page, bringing the cost of production down considerably. The page can be read back by Rainbow readers at the consumer’s end.

Sainul is currently talking to a UK-based company about manufacturing Rainbow Cards, which will be about the size of a SIM card and hold up to 5GB of data. While current technologies also allow for similar size cards to store similar amounts of data (4GB flash memory cards), manufacturing of these card on a large scale will cost just Rs. 0.50!