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Indian student’s invention stores gigabytes on paper

An Indian student claimed to store huge chunks of data on simple paper using his invention, Rainbow Technology. In a presentation, the student stored a 45sec video on a 5-by-5cm sheet and afterwards, played it back. Sainul Abideen, student of the MES College of Engineering in Kuttipuram, India, encoded the data using complex geometrical shapes instead of binary representations. These geometrical figures are printed on paper or other substrates such as plastic materials. Then, a special scanner, combined with the appropriate software, reads the codes and retransforms them into binary data. According to Austrian news agency Pressetext Austria, the student still has to prove his claim that using the method, he can store 450Gbytes on a single sheet of paper. However, he was able to store a 432-page document on a sheet, and he stored a 45sec video and played it back. At present, Abideen is developing a paper or plastic-based card about the size of a SIM card used in cellphones that can store 5Gbytes. The capacity and performance of the storage method depend on several factors including printer and scanner quality, the student said in an interview with Presstext Austria. To obtain a highly compressed data representation, the system uses geometrical patterns as well as colors, thus Abideen named his invention Rainbow Technology. Besides high storage capacity and reliability, the low material costs and the environmental impact are the major benefits of the technology, said Abideen. Furthermore, the student predicted that small "Rainbow" scanners will be integrated in mobile phones or laptops, enabling these devices to read out the stored data. “Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in “rainbow format” as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch. The paper can then be read through a specially developed scanner and the contents decoded into their original digital format and viewed or played. The encoding and decoding processes have not been revealed. Using this technology an A4 sheet of paper could store 256GB of data. In comparison, a DVD can store 4.7GB of data. The Rainbow technology is feasible because printed text, readable by the human eye is a very wasteful use of the potential capacity of paper to store data. By printing the data encoded in a denser way much higher capacities can be achieved. Paper is, of course, bio-degradable, unlike CDs or DVDs. And sheets of paper also cost a fraction of the cost of a CD or DVD.”