Had never heard of it, seems really cool. No idea if the material science of birefringent materials has come a long way since then -- perhaps James know about this, my optics knowledge is very poor. I know the lasers at NIF use some similar fancy materials for phase shifting laser light. Or maybe just frequency shifting, I think that's it actually.
Seems like the real issue is the information processing requirement. Ridiculously huge. At least it can be parallelized…since that's all we can seem to do these days. I hope we can make some serious strides in computing speed again soon…
T