Richard Donner’s classic Superman film has been saved on what is essentially a glass coaster.
Warner Bros. and Microsoft teamed up to store and retrieve the entire 1978 movie on a 3-by-3-inch transparent slab.
This success story is the first proof-of-concept test for Project Silica, a Microsoft Research scheme that uses ultrafast laser optics and artificial intelligence to cache data in quartz glass.
Unlike unstable celluloid, hard silica glass can withstand being boiled, baked, microwaved, flooded, and demagnetized, among other environmental threats that could destroy priceless cultural archives and historic treasures.
“Storing the whole Superman movie in glass and being able to read it out successfully is a major milestone,” Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure’s chief technology officer, said in a statement.
“I’m not saying all of the questions have been fully answered,” he continued. “But it looks like we’re now in a phase where we’re working on refinement and experimentation, rather [than] asking the question ‘Can we do it?'”
Microsoft senior optical scientist James Clegg loads a piece of glass into a system that uses optics and AI to retrieve and read data stored on glass (via Jonathan Banks/Microsoft)
Always on the hunt for new technologies to help safeguard its vast asset library, Warner Bros. reportedly approached Microsoft after hearing about its research.
“When we learned that Microsoft had developed this glass-based technology, we wanted to prove it out,” according to WB Chief Technology Officer Vicky Colf.
As anyone who’s had a hard drive die on them knows, long-term storage is often anything but: Magnetic tape lasts five to seven years, file formats become obsolete, and upgrades are expensive.
Glass, however, may be just the hero we need. (Not unlike Superman…)
Femtosecond lasers—commonly used in LASIK eye surgery—permanently change the structure of the glass. So you only need to write the data once for its to be preserved for centuries.
“One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation,” Ant Rowstron, partner deputy lab director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, said.
Warner Bros. migrates its own digital content—known as “cold” data—every three years to stay ahead of degradation issues.
With a nearly 100-year history in film and television, the production company owns one of the world’s deepest and most significant media and entertainment libraries.
“Imagine if a title like The Wizard of Oz or a show like Friends wasn’t available for generation after generation to enjoy and see and understand,” Colf said. “We think that’s unimaginable, and that’s why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously.
Researcher Youssef Assaf drops a square of silica glass in a kettle of boiling water to demonstrate its durability (via Jonathan Banks/Microsoft)
“Our challenges are unique in their scale,” she continued. “But they are certainly not unique in terms of the problem we are trying to solve.”
Microsoft is certainly off to a good start. But there is a lot more work ahead to meet WB’s goal of owning its own infrastructure to read data from glass archives.
“We really want something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it,” Rowstron said. “We’re not trying to build things that you put in your house or play movies from. We are building storage that operates at the cloud scale.”
Microsoft Research Cambridge collaborated with University of Southampton to develop Project Silica.
“If it works for us, we firmly believe that this will be a benefit to anyone who wants to preserve and archive content,” Colf added.
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1. Warner Bros. stores film in cold storage vaults
(via John Brecher/Microsoft)2. 'Superman' in a cold storage vault
(via John Brecher/Microsoft)3. 'Superman' stored on reels of film and on glass
(via John Brecher/Microsoft)4. Rokas Drevinskas examines laser alignment components
(via Jonathan Banks/Microsoft)5. Silica glass in front of a system that uses femtosecond laser pulses to store data
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