Midcentury Stereopanorama with Eric Drysdale: Look and see the 1950s in 3-D!

For the last 20 years, writer and comedian Eric Drysdale has been collecting photographs from the 1950s taken by amateurs with the Stereo Realist 3-dimensional camera system.  This remarkable technology was something like the ‘50s version of virtual reality, pairing Kodak’s Kodachrome film with a precision viewer to deliver uncannily realistic, full-color, three-dimensional images. Think of it as an IMAX View-Master.

During the Stereo Realist’s heyday in the early 1950s, the mass-market 3-D camera was being used in hundreds of thousands of American households —but the technology has been largely forgotten.

Eric has narrowed his collection of tens of thousands of these amazing images to about 150 of the best, and you’ll see them the way they were meant to be seen – in fully-restored high-quality vintage stereoscopic viewers.