"LOOK, LISTEN, LAUGH, and LEARN."

Over the past few months I've linked to various 3-D sites. Some of you may wonder why I keep coming back to this same subject over and over. Well, it all started with View-Master. One of my favorite things when I was growing up was looking at View-Master reels. The reels I most enjoyed were the ones that were basically dioramas built in a studio. These were like tiny, self-contained worlds. I'd spend much of my viewing time studying the backgrounds and the detailed props. The documentary photographic series reels were (and still are) enjoyable and fascinating, but it was those miniature studio sets that had my full attention.

I've dug through Google to gather together some of the more interesting View-Master sites.

The View-Master was formally made by GAF, but is now owned by Fisher-Price. They have a selection of reels that's surprisingly current.

View-Master Information has historic information on reels, viewers, cameras, etc.

The Australian Viewmaster & 3D Page focuses on Australian built View-Masters, their knock-offs, and other similar items.

Viewmaster.nl is a large site with tons of information, photos, and who knows what else. The problem is that it's all in Dutch, thus rendering it quite useless to large sections of the world's population. But it's a cool site if you just want to look at pictures of vintage equipment.

Studio 3-D makes custom View-Master reels in small quantities.

3dstereo.com sells new and vintage View-Master items in addition to virtually every other 3-D item known to man or beast.

You can see and control a wire-frame "Tribute to the Viewmaster" java applet that's (oddly) in anaglyphic 3-D format. Clever, but utterly useless. And now that I think about it, I don't even know why I included this link.