Not long after the Brewster viewer first appeared and the interest in stereoscopy grew the market for viewers grew likewise and many designs of stereoscopes appeared including some very fine British viewers. Read about box sliding viewers, book viewers, viewers with cabinets and many more.
It’s probably safe to assume that most people were introduced to 3D images via View-Master. Introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the handheld 3D viewer was a very popular format that sold literally billions of products from the 1940s right on through the 2000s. Here you’ll find a brief history of View-Master, some images from my collection and key content categories that may be of interest to those looking to start or grow their collections.
The scenes from historic documentaries presented here were up until now only viewable in 2D, but thanks to the horizontal movement of the camera and/or the object within the video, I was able to ‘extract’ stereo pairs by combining selected stills without the use of (artificial) manipulation. As a result, I was able to create 3D images from 2D video, in some cases almost a century “after the fact”.
The stereo of the tree with multicolored foliage below was my original inspiration for this series: it has so many patches of various colors that when you mirror certain slices, different colors abut one another, and it winds up looking like a pastiche of many trees rather than just one.
