Your first 3D display: the View-Master

We're all pretty excited about the new wave of 3D TVs, but you probably owned, or at least used, a 3D display at some point in your childhood. Before you disagree, think back: It's the trusty old View-Master, a colorful plastic device that was big in the 1950s and 1960s.

When you look through the View-Master at a reel (a disc containing tiny images around the edge), the pictures appear to have depth. That's because it's a basic form of 3D. Fisher-Price now sells View-Masters with Disney and Barbie stories, along with many others.

The View-Master is an offshoot of a much-earlier invention: the stereoscope, which was invented in 1840, according to Wikipedia. Stereoscopes use printed cards with side-by-side images of the same scene shot from two slightly different perspectives—essentially the same technique used by today's 3D sets. I've actually got one of these gizmos. It was my grandparents', and I'd guess it dates to the 1920s.

One of our ingenious video engineers here at Consumer Reports, Claudio Ciacci, got the idea of downloading some of these old-time stereo images from the Internet to see how they'd look on a 3D TV. Sure enough, they showed up on the big screen in honest to goodness 3D.

Here's how he did it. He searched online for "stereo images," downloaded one to his computer, then imported it into Photoshop. He cropped off the border around the side-by-side images so only the actual photo content remained, and converted it to 1920x1080 resolution. He saved it as a JPEG file on a USB flash drive, which he inserted into a Sony Playstation 3 connected to the Panasonic 3D set we're testing. He turned on the set's 3D function, and chose the side-by-side format option in the 3D menu. Put on the glasses and voila—a 3D version of the photo.

Claudio is a perfectionist, so he played around a bit with the width of the two images so they didn't look stretched on a widescreen TV. In one case, an image looked odd, because the left and right were in the wrong order. He was able to clear up the problem by choosing "Swap" in the TV's 3D menu.

If you're creative and adept at editing photos, you can take your own stereo digital photos by shooting two "eye" views of a subject (each from a slight angle) and then joining the photos and saving the files as described. Of course, you'll need either a new-fangled 3D TV or an old-fashioned stereoscope to see them in three dimensions.

Inspired by Claudio's creativity, I'm planning to dig out my old View-Master and my grandmother's stereoscope and cards and bring them in to our TV lab next week.

—Eileen McCooey