Constellation 3D

» see constellation3d.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Nobody ever owned one. That is the first fact about the fluorescent multilayer disc and it settles the question of personal memory before it can be asked. In 2000 I was on a modem in Turkey and the storage argument in my life was whether a film would fit on one CD or two. Constellation 3D was not selling to me or to anyone else. It was selling to a stock ticker.

The technology was genuinely interesting, which is what made it dangerous. A CD or a DVD reflects laser light off a metal layer, so you can only usefully stack a couple of layers before the reflections confuse each other. C3D's discs were clear the whole way through and coated with a fluorescent material: the laser did not bounce, it excited the pits, and the pits glowed back at a different wavelength. Because the emitted light is incoherent and a different color from the source, layers below and above do not interfere. Stack ten of them and you get 140 gigabytes. Stack twenty and the numbers get silly.

The company had been developing this since 1996 out of a British Virgin Islands entity with research spread across the United States, Israel, Russia and Ukraine. In march 1999 it reverse-merged into a Florida shell that had been incorporated in december 1995 under the name Latin Venture Partners and had no operations of any kind until october 1999. That is the vehicle that went public. The chairman was Itzhak Yaakov, a retired brigadier general who had run defense research for Israel.

~ the case file ~

~ the promise ~

Through 1999 and 2000 the share price rose thirty one fold in under a year, on the back of private demonstrations rather than shipped hardware. The rise was violent enough that people inside the company complained about it: one former director described the oscillations as making serious conversations with investors impossible, because the stock kept detaching from the state of the work. In january 2000 the ticker was changed to CDDDE for failing listing requirements, then corrected to CFMD two weeks later.

The public high point was COMDEX in november 2000, where a fifty gigabyte prototype was shown. Alongside the full-size disc there was to be a ClearCard, credit-card sized, holding five to ten gigabytes for use in a laptop. In august 2001 the company announced the first HDTV-compatible fluorescent multilayer disc. By then it was losing over twenty million dollars a year against no revenue at all, and it had stopped filing financial reports after 2000.

~ the day it died ~

On 17 november 2001 a Swiss-based outfit called Target Invest Consulting, registered in Saint Kitts and Nevis, agreed to fifteen million dollars of debt financing with a two million dollar bridge loan. By january 2002 nothing had closed. Target Invest kept reassuring everyone that the money was coming, to the point of having its attorney confirm it to the SEC, and it never came. In march 2002 a manufacturing joint venture with the Russian conglomerate Sistema was announced while staff were already being cut.

In april 2002 the internal legal counsel and the CFO told the board what it already knew: if operations continued without funding, the company would be signing obligations it could not meet. The board voted to stop. Everything ceased, and the bankruptcy filing followed on 13 december 2002, taking until 2006 to conclude. The technical postmortem from the general manager of products is one sentence long and worth keeping: they found a way to store data in up to twenty layers, and the material would not stay stable.

~ what came after ~

D Data Inc. bought the entire patent portfolio in 2003 and relaunched the idea as the Digital Multilayer Disk, promising six layers and a hundred gigabytes with some compatibility with existing red-laser DVD players. Its website went quiet around 2008. The Versatile Multilayer Disc later made a similar ten-layer promise and went the same way. Every one of these arrived while the industry was locked in the Blu-ray fight and had no attention left for a third option from a company nobody had heard of.

The honest reading is that the format was not beaten by Blu-ray. It was beaten by chemistry, and then by streaming, which removed the question entirely. Whatever capacity a disc reached stopped mattering once nobody needed to hold a film in their hand. Constellation 3D now shows up in lists of vaporware next to products that were never seriously attempted, which is slightly unfair to it. This one had working labs and real prototypes. It just could not make the glowing layers stay put.

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