View-Master

Put in a reel, hold it to your eyes and start clicking through a little world of 3-D pictures.

The predecessor of modern Virtual Reality headsets? Probably not. But you could load an image wheel into the View-Master, hold it up to your eyes and suddenly you're looking into another world - in 3D! Click the lever and - “click” - there's the next picture. Click it again. Another picture.

The View-Master dates all the way back to 1939, when it was introduced at the New York World's Fair. It wasn't originally marketed as a toy, or primarily to children. The early reels were more educational and informative, with scenic views of places like national parks and tourist attractions, using two photographs taken from slightly different perspectives to create the illusion of a three-dimensional image.

Things really changed when View-Master acquired the rights to Disney characters in the 1950s. After that you could get reels featuring Disneyland, Disney movies, TV shows and eventually just about every popular children's character you could think of. Instead of looking at pictures of the Grand Canyon, kids could look through the viewer and see Mickey Mouse and friends.

A View-Master reel (a circular disc with translucent images around the outer edge) only had seven 3-D scenes, so you would tend to look at each one carefully for a while before clicking ahead.

There have been many different View-Master viewers over the years, but the familiar red plastic version is probably the one most people remember - the viewer held up to your eyes, a reel sticking out of the top, and your finger on the trigger button ready to click to the next picture.