That's how I felt about having 500GB years ago. I was like "wow TB hard drives? One drive will last me forever" Then I started collecting movies and TV shows. It's hard to imagine a PB now but I can see a person accumulating at least 1PB in data over their lives. Maybe not the average person any time soon, but a good data hoarder would make good use of 1PB.
There's definitely going to be an increase in quality and stuff that will make file sizes larger. Doing the math, I could store about 10000 movies in 1PB if they were 100GB each (50GB is the upper limit on uncompressed Blu-Ray). I currently have about 1200 movies. So even if all my movies were Blu-Ray quality I would still be well under 1PB. At 4k or 8k, I don't know.
There's definitely going to be an upper limit on image resolution. Probably not because of a Moore's-law thing, but just because after a certain point it'll be a waste. If your monitor is 35 inches, there's no sense in having a 20K image on it. At that point, all those extra pixels would be too tiny for you to see anyways. At some point there will be diminishing returns in quality. And the same thing for images on bigger screens. You could have a 100" TV but a 40K image would still be way too much for it. High resolution images like that would have a purpose in science, engineering, or novelty entertainment. But it wouldn't be the norm.
Plus even if storage is large enough, you have to transmit those 40K images over the internet or play them as frames in a movie or game. So even if storage is big enough to handle them, our networks and hardware might be too weak to transfer or display them.
One of the things that's happened is that instead of producing a true 4k image, lower resolution images are just upscaled. This is likely the kind of stuff you'll see that'll bring about 16K images rather than true 16K. We'll get better at making high quality images from lower ones, the cost of producing images will be shared between storage of the lower res files with computing power to turn them into high res, and we'll coast on that for a long while. TVs already do this in some way. Games are starting to do this both when producing the final image on your screen and to conserve disk space for textures.
But you're right to point out VR type stuff. Because then you're talking about instead of a single image as a movie frame, or a single picture, you essentially have 6 images (top, bottom, left, right, front, back) at each frame. So now your movies and home videos and whatever else is that much bigger. That would definitely make it easier to get to 1PB.
Great post. It's interesting to consider. Foveated rendering is another consideration, which might allow handling ultra high res frames on hardware or previously thought to be too weak.
That's how I felt about having 500GB years ago. I was like "wow TB hard drives? One drive will last me forever" Then I started collecting movies and TV shows. It's hard to imagine a PB now but I can see a person accumulating at least 1PB in data over their lives. Maybe not the average person any time soon, but a good data hoarder would make good use of 1PB.
But what about when everything gets re released in 4000K? 360Vision?
A movie will be a petabyte and we'll still be complaining about storage lol
There's definitely going to be an increase in quality and stuff that will make file sizes larger. Doing the math, I could store about 10000 movies in 1PB if they were 100GB each (50GB is the upper limit on uncompressed Blu-Ray). I currently have about 1200 movies. So even if all my movies were Blu-Ray quality I would still be well under 1PB. At 4k or 8k, I don't know.
There's definitely going to be an upper limit on image resolution. Probably not because of a Moore's-law thing, but just because after a certain point it'll be a waste. If your monitor is 35 inches, there's no sense in having a 20K image on it. At that point, all those extra pixels would be too tiny for you to see anyways. At some point there will be diminishing returns in quality. And the same thing for images on bigger screens. You could have a 100" TV but a 40K image would still be way too much for it. High resolution images like that would have a purpose in science, engineering, or novelty entertainment. But it wouldn't be the norm.
Plus even if storage is large enough, you have to transmit those 40K images over the internet or play them as frames in a movie or game. So even if storage is big enough to handle them, our networks and hardware might be too weak to transfer or display them.
One of the things that's happened is that instead of producing a true 4k image, lower resolution images are just upscaled. This is likely the kind of stuff you'll see that'll bring about 16K images rather than true 16K. We'll get better at making high quality images from lower ones, the cost of producing images will be shared between storage of the lower res files with computing power to turn them into high res, and we'll coast on that for a long while. TVs already do this in some way. Games are starting to do this both when producing the final image on your screen and to conserve disk space for textures.
But you're right to point out VR type stuff. Because then you're talking about instead of a single image as a movie frame, or a single picture, you essentially have 6 images (top, bottom, left, right, front, back) at each frame. So now your movies and home videos and whatever else is that much bigger. That would definitely make it easier to get to 1PB.
Great post. It's interesting to consider. Foveated rendering is another consideration, which might allow handling ultra high res frames on hardware or previously thought to be too weak.