I purchased a Sony PlayStation 3 recently. I thoroughly read the accompanying manual on a train ride and a particular detail caught this optical media aficionado’s eye:
Wait… what? Star-shaped discs? Heart-shaped ones as well? Are those real? How would those even work? I know about 80 cm discs that fit in the smaller groove of a CD tray. I also know about the business card-shaped CD’s; I even have a few games that were published on such a form factor (for example). But a star has points. And a heart? How?
A brief bit of Googling for “star shaped disc” leads me directly to the Wikipedia article on shaped CDs, which happens to showcase a heart-shaped CD. But how would a star-shaped disc work? That (typically) has 5 points. Where would the circular track go, the one that holds data? I figure there could be sort of a fat star, a circle with 5 points. This turns out to be the correct idea as this disc manufacturing page indicates.
Check out the page and see the oddest shape– the house CD.
Thankfully those star shape discs were not used in Dark Angel (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099817).
The Chemical Brothers “Star Guitar” was released on a star shaped CD (which I own), http://www.discogs.com/image/R-234428-1166034910.jpeg
Also, I assume you were referring to 8cm (80mm) CDs. Could you imagine trying to carry around a CD walkman/discman designed to play 80cm discs? :-) (well, it’s hard to imagine even carrying around a CD walkman/discman at all these days)
Some years ago I had an audio CD with 6-7 Christmas songs, shaped and printed like Santa on his sledge :) :)
(Not very) strangely, it actually didn’t work very well in some drives ….