[youtube=http://youtu.be/FJhY21qJe_U]

Introduced at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, View-Master has been a staple of children’s toy boxes since the mid-1960s, when it made the transition from elaborate postcard and military training aid to a full-fledged entertainment product. The View-Master is best known for its circular picture discs with 3D images that you can see when you peep through it, as well as for its noisy, spring-loaded advancing mechanism.

How we’d update it: Make it wearable, like a pair of sunglasses, and in place of static images, it’d play animated scenes stored on a memory card. What’s more, it could overlay the video onto the real world, à la Google’s Project Glass.

This article was written by Randy Nelson and originally appeared on Tecca.

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