RVD (Rainbow Versatile Disc) the future of storage ?

plastic.jpgAfter the Micro Windmill charger here is another ingenious solution from India, the RVD (Rainbow Versatile Disc) developed by Sainul Abideen studying computer applications in the Southern Indian state of Kerala. He has termed his invention Rainbow Technology using which discs can be developed from paper or even plastic paper and they can hold upto 450 GB which is much more than HD-DVD or Blu-ray discs. 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. Trigonometric forms like circle or square, certain colour combinations and certain other forms are being used. Each trigonometric form and colour 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 low the data storage is made possible. When the steps are reversed, the rainbow picture is converted into data.


Rainbow cards which are no bigger than a SIM card can hold upto 5 GB of data. Another advantage of the RVD's is the cost of manufacturing each disc costs only 50 paise to 1 Rs (1 to 2 cents). Only time will tell if this technology ever makes it mainstream, I really hope it does as it will take care of the dreaded plastic disposal problem.

November 25, 2006 - 11:47 AM | Related Entries - Computing | Comments ()


Reader Comments

  1. Ron on "

    No offense intended but this whole story sounds more like a load of garbage than the garbage these disks are supposedly made from.

    I don't care how cheap your manufacturing costs are - you cannot gather the materials from the dump, sort them, remove the impurities, process the cleaned material, form it into the proper shape, imprint the data, and test it for 2 cents.

    The mention of how they store data using trigonometric shapes is also laughable.. Seems to me this is an inventor's idea that has yet to be exposed to the light of reality...

  1. Gotta_Deal_Forya on "

    Yeah right.

    Some guy in his basement doing what millions in R&D funding cannot. I believe it, really.

  1. Frankafus on "

    Holy crap... that'd make Sony's Blu Ray go outta buisness so fast.... lol

  1. Kampfgnom on "

    The guy who developed "Rainbow" actually played a Video from a piece of paper when he presented his technology.
    You see: It's already working!

  1. JR on "

    It will be interesting to see if this thing stands up to scrutiny.

    If you think about it, "on" and "off" are pretty basic, universal, pieces of information, and they're what all current technologies use to encode and decode data. Doing anything other than "on" and "off" (shapes and colors) seems unlikely to be general purpose. That is to say, it might work great for storing some things (maybe images, graphics, movies, etc.), but probably poor at storing other things (maybe applications or other binary streams of data). It still might have a place. If I can store a movie in two or three pages of paper, maybe it doesn't matter that storing an application would require me to chop down 1000 trees -- I just won't store applications with it -- I'll use some other method.

    Nevertheless, it'll be interesting to see what happens with this technology.

  1. ankur on "

    If it is, it is pure ingenius...
    Hats off to you Sainul Abideen

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