For over ten years now we have been making custom reels for View-Master viewers. A fun and ‘retro’ revival of the classic toy of the 1970s (though dating back to the 1930s) but allowing your own digital photos to be immortalised on old school looking View-Master reels.
We perfected the way of bringing together our business of converting digital imagery to real photographic film (which we have been doing since the 1990s) along with a methodology to recreate the original View-Master process of reel making, as far as production volumes and modern materials allow.
All well and good. But one question remains after all this time: can you make 3D reels from standard digital photos from my digital phone/camera (i.e. 2D)?
Up until now the answer has been no. If you are an enthusiast stereographer who is shooting with a 3D camera (a camera with two lenses creating two photos – a left-eye view and a right-eye view) then obviously there is no problem – we have been supplying 3D reels all this time. But these 3D reels are maybe 100th of the total of reels we produce. In truth, the 2D reels we make look great – fulfilling the needs of a fun present for a loved one or a personal memory or a business promotional item.
Still, isn’t there a way to turn 2D photos into 3D? Well, there was and is. If you are a skilled Adobe Photoshop, Premiere or After Effects user then you can deconstruct an image by using masks and layers and there is an (old) computer programme that can do some donkeywork for you. But all require a thorough understanding if what 3D is and how it works. Importantly, an understanding of how the brain creates a world with depth using two eyes and using this knowledge to trick the brain into ‘seeing’ 3D from two 2D images. Get it wrong and your brain cannot make sense of what the eyes are recording and the reel is an expensive disaster. It would have been better to stick with 2D reels!
So why can’t we use these techniques to make 3D reels for our customers? Simply, economics. There is no way we can make an affordable product given the time input – time is money after all.
Until now. Throughout 2024 we took a great deal if interest in how the AI world was moving forward with still and video imagery, constructing stunning images from just a list of basic typed keywords. What AI was doing was improving exponentially. And we started asking if this could apply to 3D creation too. More importantly, could you take a real, existing photo and ask AI to analyse the image, understand its content and context and rebuild the data to create a left-eye view and a right-eye view. We tried all manners of things and eventually found an AI engine provider who could exactly fulfill our specific needs.
Much testing later we have finally introduced our customised View-Master reels with the option of 3D images based on supplied 2D photos. It’s working out amazingly and we can’t wait to see what customers think of the results. Bringing the traditional photographic process based in the 1800s, the View-Master process of the 1930s and the tech of the 2020s.