[spitfire]

This is a very good post. One I've thought about in a different context before: How much bandwidth/resolution do we really need.

The human senses have an upper limit of resolution, once we reach that limit further progress is irrelevant. So once everyone is streaming netflix at limitx2, Where does further bandwidth/storage demand come from? Growing populations? There's a limit to that growth. "big data"? Hardly.

We're rapidly approaching the point where individuals' need for further storage is exhausted. I think it'll be somewhere in the 10-100PB range. Which is pretty damn close.

[ken]

17 years ago, Jakob Nielsen predicted a maximum of "about four tera bits per second bandwidth without compression, or one Tbps with some compression": http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9511.html

Interestingly, he also predicted that "it will probably be about seventeen years before these perfect monitors are commonplace", though I think he was just looking at VRAM requirements.

[dvdhsu]

When a new product is created, companies compete initially on features. When all the essential features are there (take radios, for example: most radios have the basic features down), innovation starts. Innovation, such as portable radios, radios in your car, etc. push the industry forwards for a while.

Eventually though, innovation stops (I don't see many new radio sets today). When that happens, the product becomes almost a commodity, and another product improves so greatly upon it that the other product can be considered a new product.

Television, for example, replaced radio (two senses versus one sense). The internet, arguably, appeals to the same senses, but allows for user-created content, more freedom, etc.

When we reach the upper bound of innovation for television sets, it too will become a commodity. Perhaps it will eventually be replaced with a product that not only exceeds the capabilities of human sound and sight (for television to hit the bound for innovation, this must happen), but also incorporates something else: maybe it's another sense, maybe it's something more convenient (I guess the internet, could, to some extent, be considered as an evolution of television).

[OpieCunningham]

How much data does a 2 hour immersive holographic "film" consume?

[a-priori]

Assuming the holographic system uses voxels, it would need to be capable of displaying 108,900 (330x330) voxels per cubic inch to allow the same level of resolution as an iPhone 4 if it produces a flat surface. This would allow Retina-quality images when viewed from at least 11 inches away.

Assuming also that one voxel is 32 bits and not compressed, then the hologram would be 435,600 bytes per frame per cubic inch. At 24fps (you did say "film") that's 10,454,400 bytes per second per cubic inch.

Let's say it projects a hologram to fill a room the dimensions of a Star Trek-style holodeck, a cube of maybe 10 metres on a side. That's about 400 inches on a side, or 64,000,000 cubic inches. That means that a holographic film would be 669,081,600,000,000 bytes (608.5 terabytes) per second.

So, to answer your question, a 2 hour holographic film would be 4,817,387,520,000,000,000 bytes (4.178 exabytes) in size.

[swalsh]

Fortunately, i'd be willing to bet you could use some kind of Occlusion culling to compress that stream quite a bit.

[a-priori]

Yup, there's surely a ton of ways to compress that. Occlusion culling would be one, since you'd never see the insides of objects. For another, modulo atmospheric effects like fog and smoke, there'd be a lot of empty space between objects that even run-length encoding could compact quite a bit. I'm sure that even with lossless compression you could get it down to the petabyte range.