I’ve seen it used on more than one science fiction movie/series. A character is standing over a horizontally-mounted touchscreen display, and tosses a small memory card down on the display. The display…uh…displays a visual indicator around the card and starts reading from it. Seems like a pretty cool idea, could we actually make one? Any reason it would be too demanding to combine something like near-field communications and RFID to make an install-less memory card?
Isn’t that sort of what CDs are?
~Max
No? (More letters for Discourse)
What I mean is reading memory with an optical device, as opposed to using a physical needle or an electrical circuit to read the data.
If the user is just placing a card on a flat surface, I’d guess the memory device is either optical storage or magnetic storage.
~Max
Nothing intrinsic. Bandwidth is the most likely stumbling block. We pretty much manage to increase storage capacity, coms bandwidth, and expectations in step with one another.
A USB 3 storage drive might contain 128GB of data and read at 4.8G bits/second. So with overheads maybe takes a minute odd to read. Which is pretty miraculous.
Getting a wireless interface to run this fast is going to be a challenge. But it could get into the ballpark. Whether it gets close enough for human patience is another matter.
You would probably want to use an RF interface instead of something optical. The technology for high density 3-D optical storage devices isn’t quite there yet.
The device would cost a lot more to produce, and would probably be a bit slower than existing memory cards, but it could be done. It would have no benefit over existing memory cards though, so the cons (lower speed, higher cost) definitely outweigh the pros (none).
As for SF use of the tech, it is in The Expanse, and in a recent episode of Star Trek Picard to name two.
But with radio there’s no need to place the memory card on the surface of the machine, which I interpreted the OP as being a necessary part of the technology.
~Max
If the device is beam-powered (like RFID, mentioned by the OP) then it will have a very short range due to the device not having much power to transmit its responses to data requests. So its range would be something like RFID-type keycards where you have to hold them very close to the reader.
If it’s not beam-powered then it needs a battery which will need to be replaced, and also can’t be made anywhere near as compact. This would make the device significantly worse than existing memory cards.
You would probably be better placing it on the surface of a small tray next to the display rather than on the display itself, but it could be done with existing technology. That way the card reader isn’t integrated into the display.
So, I’m imagining something like tap to pay credit card terminals with LED screens. But instead of credit card information, it has Death Star plans or something. Is there a problem where the card requires too much power to read from a larger data store?
~Max
The card could be powered by an induction system behind the display, like wireless phone charging works today. But once powered, the device could transmit using an ordinary wireless system. There’s not much reason to combine the two systems since they optimize differently.
There are other options. The device could be optically read, for instance–use a light valve of some kind and a laser behind the display (using a wavelength that the display is transparent to). The light valve could be very low powered since it only needs to let light through or not…
But these are tossed anywhere on the display, not in a specific region with the laser behind it. (I’m not really thinking about future technologies that could potentially do this. I’m wondering if it is doable right now with currently existing technologies that just haven’t been bundled that way. It seemed to me that it could.)
Like I said, you would be better off having a small tray next to the display that you just toss the device into. That is fairly easy to do with existing technology.
If you want to be able to toss the device onto the display itself, then the RF transmitter that powers the device has to send all of that RF energy through the display, and then it has to read a very weak response from the device (since the device is beam powered and doesn’t have much transmitting power) back through the display. The transmission of RF through the display might cause some issues for the display itself. I haven’t really studied how modern displays handle RF interference like that so I can’t really answer that part. The reader/writer might also have a very difficult time picking out the device’s response from RF noise generated by the display.
These are both probably solvable, if you are willing to throw enough money at the problem. So I would call it probably doable, but definitely impractical due to all of the extra costs involved.
You could just use the light used to illuminate the screen. A typical present-day LCD has a light diffuser that spreads out light from either the edges or behind the display to the whole surface. You could embed a photodiode in there to receive the reflected, modulated light. With some extra components, you could send information on multiple frequency bands at once.
Lotta good thoughts by the real experts upthread.
I’ll just point out the OP’s device is optimized not for utility, but for Rule of Cool. Tossing it on the display and having the display show some graphical BS as it “recognizes the device” is all about giving the audience something to watch while the actors deliver dialog. And making it look different enough from sticking a familiar USB stick into a familiar USB slot. Can’t have our alien or 23rd Century tech looking like something the audience knows they can buy at Wal*Mart today.
As well, who uses truly horizontal displays? They’re silly in so many ways at least for humanoid users. Something with at least some slope is much more ergonomic.
Story time:
Back in the early 2000s Microsoft released the first thing they named a “Surface”. It was a touchscreen coffee table and insanely expensive.
My IT firm bought one of the first of them. Given the tech of the time it was simultaneously miraculous and clunky. But what it mostly was was pointless. Our hope was to make a geographical situation display that leaders could stand around and poke fingers at to drill down into the symbology, give movement directions to forces, etc. Turns out the horizontal form factor looked cool, but really made it hard to operate. It was also remarkably fragile. Oh well. But damn did it look cool; the Wow factor during demos was palpable.
See historical review here if you’re not familiar with this gizmo. It really was totally Rule of Cool with all the non-functionality that implies:
The “graphical BS” is quite similar to the “splash” on the screen by the USB port when you plug in the cable on an Android phone.
First thing I thought of - anything glass-like close to horizontal orientation generally is too reflective in an office environment where lighting tends to be large panels overhead. Non-glass tends to be too fragile a scratch-magnet, especially with stuff being tossed on it. Plus, displays tend to do best when viewed straight on, so even somewhat tilted is better than flat, but then your card needs to be magnetic to not slide off. Second, tossing the chip on the display obscures part of the display. Unless displays are very large so you can waste some area, and/or have the smarts to know “this part is blocked, don’t hide text under it” then why not have a separate reader tray.
If I was going to make something like that today, I would make them actually connect over something like wifi for speed. Then use RFID just like your tap to pay credit card to share the passwords/key required to connect. It would feel like you describe, but long data transfers could continue even if you moved away.
Yup. Functionally no different from any other portable storage device but will look much cooler. I’d get one.
The issue would be powering a high-speed transfer, I’d think. No room for batteries inside of a device around the dimensions of a MicroSD card (which is what is used in the SF shows, and I was envisoning).