14 Facts About View-Master

View-Master is the trademark name of a line of special-format stereoscopes and corresponding View-Master "reels", which are thin cardboard disks containing seven Stereoscopic 3-D pairs of small transparent color photographs on film.

View-Master system was introduced in 1939, four years after the advent of Kodachrome color film made the use of small, high-quality photographic color images practical.

View-Master reel holds 14 film transparencies in seven pairs, making up the seven stereoscopic images.

View-Master was introduced at the 1939 New York World's Fair, marked "Patent Applied For".

The View-Master had been constructed originally from Kodak Tenite plastic and then Bakelite, a hard, sturdy, somewhat heavy plastic.

Related searches

Under GAF's ownership, View-Master reels began to feature fewer scenic and more child-friendly subjects, such as toys and cartoons.

In 1980, View-Master released the Show Beam Projector, a toy that combined the company's stereoscopic images and flashlight technology to produce a portable hand-held projector.

In 1985, View-Master entered into the video foray, by starting View-Master Video and teamed up with Warner Bros.

View-Master was placed organizationally in Mattel's pre-school division and is marketed under the Fisher-Price imprint, who continues emphasis on juvenile content.

In February 2015, Mattel announced a collaboration with Google to produce a new version of View-Master called the View-Master Virtual Reality Viewer, based on virtual reality using smartphones.

The new View-Master is an implementation of the Google Cardboard VR platform, and is accompanied by a mobile app that was built using its SDK.

Greenbot considered the View-Master to be the best low-cost Cardboard viewer, citing its build quality and comfort over models actually constructed from cardboard, but noting that the latch mechanism for securing the phone inside was not tight enough, and that there was no headphone jack access.

View-Master is part of the National Toy Hall of Fame of the United States.

View-Master produced custom reels for commercial customers to show 3-D images of products and services to potential clients.