Brian May revives Victorian virtual reality

By the way:

> What most film histories leave out is that the Lumière Brothers were trying to achieve a 3D image even prior to this first-ever public exhibition of motion pictures. Louis Lumière eventually re-shot L'Arrivée d’un Train with a stereoscopic film camera and exhibited it (along with a series of other 3D shorts) at a 1934 meeting of the French Academy of Science. Given the contradictory accounts that plague early cinema and pre-cinema accounts, it's plausible that early cinema historians conflated the audience reactions at these separate screenings of L'Arrivée d’un Train. The intense audience reaction fits better with the latter exhibition, when the train apparently was actually coming out of the screen at the audience. But due to the fact that the 3D film never took off commercially as the conventional 2D version did, including such details would not make for a compelling myth.

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Arriv%C3%A9e_d%27un_trai...)

If you grew up in the 1960's & 70's, you may have had a View-Master 3-D stereoscope. As far as I know there was no way to produce your own reels, so you were limited to the commercial ones, which were usually tie-ins with movies and TV shows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master

My dad has some these. There was a doodad for kids in the 70s which did more or less the same thing called the 'viewmaster' -it even had cartridges for 3-d views of stuff like Space-1999. They still sell it on Amazon.

The one we had, had lovely soft velvet liner around the eye shield. The slides were good. Much nicer to use than the viewmaster, bigger images and far more clarity. I can't remember what slides we had, a mix of portrait and exotic locations. I think it was pressed tin with a floral motif and wooden handle. Obviously made to impress.

Brian May's company: https://www.londonstereo.com/

Our family possess one of these.

The slides all seem to be of the Boer war. I find it hard to work out how they were viewed (metaphorically). Were they 'news'? Entertainment or something else? They aren't jingoistic, showing off dead enemy, or weapons etc. Just quite boring.

There's something strange about putting together 3D and Victorian. Just like those colour WW1 and WW2 images look a bit, off.