A "3-D CD"

ZMaro, SCobbler, and I were chatting about video games at my late birthday party yesterday, and at some point ZM mentioned that the Playstation was supposed to be a "3-D system," yet there seemed to be as many 2-D games on it as there were 3-D games. "Well, those disks are pretty flat," I joked. "A true 3-D system would have some triangular prism that floats in mid-air and is read by lasers from multiple directions."

As many of our conversations go, this simple, witty comment shot us off on a whole different tangent as we began discussing how a three-dimensional "CD" would function.

SC, being a bit over-practical for the amount of sugar we were running off, pointed out that a pyramid would be almost impossible to spin like a CD and be read; a sphere would work much better. Before I could say more than "A sphere is dull," he added that a cone would be best, because you wouldn't have to deal with the inconsistent proximity of the sphere's surface to the reading laser. I wasn't sure what he was talking about at the time, although now I think he might have been referring to a single laser moving in a perpendicular direction to the sphere's spinning, like a CD player's laser moving from the inside to the outside. If this is the case, a cone would help, as the angle would never change. However, a cone would truly remedy the problem if it was spun on a tilted axis such that the side facing the laser was vertically straight, but if you went in that direction you might as well settle on a cylinder.

I, on the other hand, wasn't thinking of having the object spin whilst the laser(s) moved. I was picturing an object held in the center of a zero-G container rotating (though not necessarily spinning quickly) in any direction so that fixed lasers could read every area. However, I still didn't manage to communicate this because ZMaro took us completely off-guard by saying that the lasers would spin around the sphere. My dad kind of stabbed the idea and left it for dead by exposing the inefficiency of doing that. Then SCobbler practically discarded the whole anti-gravity part by suggesting "rollers" that would turn the sphere (of course, I suppose using a cone might negate the antigrav as well).

I eventually just verbalized the fact that a pyramid would be the coolest, but SC wouldn't go down without a fight. Thanks to him we began rationalizing the dilemma of where information is located. He said that a sphere or pyramid would cause issues with where to start reading and it would be impractical to have "directions" all over the thing to point to what to read next. "Hey," I said, "by the time this is done in the first place, data storage will be so advanced that it shouldn't pose a problem." I think we ended on that note, but it may only have been because ZM had to leave.

So we went from yakking about games to theorizing 3-D optical storage, and all the while our parents stood by watching and waiting for us to finish. As ZM said last night, "Sometimes I forget just how nerdy we sound."