One branch of theoretical physics believes that the Universe is just a holographic version of 2D information. And scientists have observed such being true, the 2D horizon around a black hole encoding the data from its earlier 3D star stage. You've observed the idea yourself as well, as it's not so different from a 3D movie playing from a DVD, or even music playing from data on a CD, really.

From New Scientist:

If space-time is a grainy hologram, then you can think of the universe as a sphere whose outer surface is papered in Planck length-sized [ed: uber tiny] squares, each containing one bit of information. The holographic principle says that the amount of information papering the outside must match the number of bits contained inside the volume of the universe.

Since the volume of the spherical universe is much bigger than its outer surface, how could this be true? Hogan realised that in order to have the same number of bits inside the universe as on the boundary, the world inside must be made up of grains bigger than the Planck length. "Or, to put it another way, a holographic universe is blurry," says Hogan.

We won't rewrite New Scientist's entire brilliant piece, but needless to say, that Hogan guy in the quote above not only thinks that a new experiment may have found that noise in our holographic signal—he predicted the experiment's results before they happened. Hit the link to blow your pea brain for the day. Then ask yourself if we're all just bits of information on God's hard drive. [New Scientist and image]

Though that's still far slower than the refresh rate of normal 2D television sets, the researchers said that speeding the frame rate up would be a piece of cake compared to the first breakthrough. They were so confident, they even gave a time peg—five to ten years before the technology would reach the market. That's right, folks! Five to ten years before every wannabe-Luke Skywalker in the world will get to endlessly loop that integral Star Wars scene.

Here are a couple more reasons to wait. InPhase, the makers of the drives, say they're planning on raising storage to 1.6TB by 2010, as well as hopefully raising drive speeds, which are stuck at 20MBps right now. An interesting start to what may be the holographic era, but for the meantime we'll be sticking to DVDs and standard hard disks, thanks. – Jason Chen

InPhase begins shipping holographic storage [The Register via Crunchgear]

Don't be fooled by the bandying about of the term "holographic," because there's not really any 3D going on here. It's just a cool-looking cut-glass screen, a bit bigger than its predecessor, the Claro Holographic Television that was on sale at Harrods London for 15,000 a couple of years ago. Buyer beware, starting bid is 5500 (about $10,427). – Charlie White

Product page [eBay, via BornRich]

Homeland Security Tries New 3-D Technology At Super Bowl XL [The Pittsburgh Channel]

Optware to Release 30 GB Holographic Card for Less than $1 at the End of 2006 [TechON]