When I was little most gadgets commonly floating around had memory capacity measurable in Kilobytes. The most these gadgets could do was entertain you with very simple monochrome video games (think Snake or Tetris) or keep track of your contact phone numbers (this was before emails or the internet). The most capacious of these gadgets could serve as a minimal, single-language dictionary. That was about it as far as handheld devices go.
Very few people bothered to dream of what the world would look like given memory capacity orders of magnitude higher.
As a teenager I lived in world full of gadgets that had Megabyte-level capacity. Those could engage you in more realistic gaming, with hundreds of colors and sometimes sound effects too. The best of them could store your notes, kick your butt at chess, or even store and play your favorite playlist of 20 songs or so.
Very few people bothered to dream of what the world would look like given memory capacity orders of magnitude higher.
Today we are swamped with Gigabyte-capacity gadgets. These things can already display graphics that saturate your eye's visual acuity threshold, be it in the size of the color dots, the number of different shades of color, or the rate of change of colors over time. The result is images and videos that look just as detailed to your eyes as the real thing.
Sound is also saturated, so that the bitrate, maximum frequency, and maximum amplitude of sound stored and synthesized by these gadgets already makes it sound to your ears like the real thing.
Today you are able to store your entire music library, your entire photo album collection, your entire book collection, and your entire software/game collection into one gadget, shuv it into your pocket and walk around with it. You are also able to talk to your gadgets, and use them to store and play a bunch of your favorite movies and TV shows.
Very few people bother to dream of what the world would look like given memory capacity orders of magnitude higher.
If I told you I could fit 128 Terabytes of memory into one gadget (that's about 1000 times more memory than the best gadget on the market today), what ideas can you come up with to put all that memory to good use?
Here are some bad answers:
- Store images/videos at higher fidelity (more color detail, higher resolution, higher framerate, etc.):
While we are not exactly at the peak yet, we are pretty close. We need less than one more order of magnitude of memory capacity to get there. And of course, there isn't much point in recording higher fidelity media once we satisfy visual acuity threshold of the human eye!
- Store your entire movie collection and your entire TV show collection on one gadget:
Unlike music, people are just not fond of replaying their favorite TV/movies over and over again, say while driving or working out. Besides, in a world where internet connection is omnipresent, downlink bandwidth is ever more capacious, and video streaming is ever more easy, why do you need to cache your entire video library in your pocket? You can just stream any flick you can think of anywhere anytime!
Now without further ado, here is my growing
List of Good Uses for Terabyte Gadgets:
- Continual recording
Your visual memory doesn't have an Off button, and neither should the visual memory of your gadget! Gadgets today record video as a luxury, only for minutes at a time. Imagine a gadget that "sees" the world continually, and remembers what it sees. Combined with the ability to identify objects, colors, and text in what it sees, your gadget can then become your life companion. Your ever-loyal Passepartout. Your partner in crime! you can then ask it questions like:
- "What was the price of that red T-shirt I saw at Macy's yesterday?"
- "Show me the face of that guy I met on the train to Paris last summer"
- "Was the window open when I left my apartment this morning?"
- "Show me some memorable clips from our camping trip of 2004"
- "Have I met this woman before?"
- Walkabout Movies
Films are recorded today using multiple cameras, each at its own vantage point. The footage is then interleaved during the editing phase so that the resulting video shows the footage from only one vantage point at a time, hopping serially from one viewpoint to another over time, as the editor sees fit. The resulting digital file occupies about 4 Gigabytes of memory per hour of recording at the highest visual fidelity.
Now given Terabyte gadgets, you can potentially store the visual recording of each and every camera together into one file. Movies recorded using -say- 100 strategically placed cameras, given the capacity to interpolate visual signals, can be viewed from any imaginable viewpoint during playback! This way the audience can interactively move about the recorded scene freely, as if they were actually in there with the camera crew. As they move, the image they see and sound they hear change convincingly to satisfy the mind with the illusion.
A movie filmed that way would result in a digital file at 400 Gigabytes per hour in high fidelity, which pretty much necessitates Terabyte memory to hold a modest collection of say a dozen movies.
What would you do with Terabyte gadgets? Let me know!
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