But here's a brief description. Very, very, simply, a single laser beam is split and directed at a right angle towards a photosensitive material. Where the beams meet the molecules change to blue. The clear unaltered molecules represent zeros. To access the data a different colored beam is shown which interacts only with the blue molecules.
Sensors see the reaction and interpret the hologram.
The data is stored in three dimentional holograms which can be super imposed over each other in a storage medium. It is estimated that one thousand holograms can be retrieved each second. With a thousand pixels in each hologram, this translates into a output rate of 1 gigbyte per second. The main problems right now, are the cost of the devices and the instability of the storage media. However, the potential of storing terabytes of data with unbelievably fast access times makes the study worth it.