Comment by lisper
7 years ago
There is a limit though. By the time you get to the point where you can store more high-definition movies than you can possibly watch in a lifetime you have definitely passed the point of diminishing returns. And with non-volatile storage, we're pretty much already there.
Until a new format comes out which requires magnitudes more storage?
I can already imagine vr-style videos pushing 8k with huge dynamic range and very high framerates becoming more common if the technology continues to go that direction, and suddenly a full video export in the highest quality becomes a magnitude (or 2!) jump larger.
As videogames become higher resolutions, they require higher res textures, and less compressed audio, and more detailed models. Not just like 50% more detailed, but 10x more detailed.
Sure, we are beyond the point now where it's pretty easy for the average person to store all information they ever could need on spinning disks for pretty cheap, but once that next "thing" comes out that requires a magnitude more, we are right back to looking silly for thinking 5tb should be enough for anyone!
> Until a new format comes out which requires magnitudes more storage?
No, even that has a limit. We're getting to the point where humans will be unable to perceive additional improvements in resolution. It's no different from audio. CDs are unchanged from when they were introduced 36 years ago because humans cannot hear the difference between a CD and "higher-qualitY" audio. There is a point where that will happen for video: when you can fill the entire field of view of the human eye with video the same resolution as your fovea at ~100FPS, that's it. There is no more room for improvement.
> No, even that has a limit. We're getting to the point where humans will be unable to perceive additional improvements in resolution.
Not all improvements come with only resolution as the change. It's entirely possible (if somewhat less feasible, based on what I think) that we might start encoding movies as full 3D landscapes, with some preset positions for each scene (e.g. where the director wants the"camera"), but that people could roam around to view it from different aspects at their discretion. This is less or more interesting in certain performances, but imagine some great war film, and you can flit around to see the different people storming the beach or crossing no-man's land. What if you decide to make your own run and see if you would have made it or not?
3D headsets are just now breaking into the mainstream. That's a major shift in medium if taken advantage of, and it could easily create use cases where the media is many multiples of it's current size.
> There is a point where that will happen for video: when you can fill the entire field of view of the human eye with video the same resolution as your fovea at ~100FPS, that's it. There is no more room for improvement.
There's a lot of room for improvement in VR though. VR is computationally expensive because you have to calculate 2 sets of high resolution imagery. Not to mention that immersiveness in VR comes at a resolution cost. We're nowhere near 100FPS, high resolution 4k VR imagery.
I mostly agree with you. I wrote a paper during my time at Bose arguing against the rise of 4k which in retrospect I think has only been halfway true so far -- we've known for many years that consumers would not experience a significant improvement upgrading their televisions, but the 4k market is burgeoning anyways. We also didn't anticipate back then how important 4k would be to gaming and VR.
Not to mention that the lack of penetration of higher quality music in the market is mostly a cost problem rather than a storage problem. The average consumer cannot afford the sound setup necessary to truly utilize these higher quality codecs, whereas a 4k television panel can be had for under 500 now a days (!!!!). Netflix offers 4k streaming at 10/month, whereas Tidal's lossless streaming costs 20/month. It is shockingly inexpensive to be into high quality images.
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Just jump to the real limit: at some point, you can't fit more information into a space without creating a black hole.
How about storing entire realistic maps of worlds that you can walk around in?
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Storage doesn't really have diminishing returns unfortunately when it comes to fidelity.
Fidelity has diminishing returns though.