Scan and See Your Old View-Master Reels with This Smart Scanner

What Is the View-Master?

People born after 1995 probably don't know what the View-Master is or how it functions. As a refresher, the View-Master was an image consumption device that showed a series of stereoscopic slides in succession, almost like a mechanical VR headset. They were quite popular throughout the 1960s to the 1990s, but then quickly died out at the turn of the millennium. Images are stored within tiny translucent windows on small disks that rotate to show a new set of pictures whenever a button is pressed.

Electronic components

Trying to scan tiny panes of images within a small disk presents a few challenges, but the View-Master Reel Scanner project aims to overcome them. The most important component in this project is the camera, since that is how the slides can be converted into a digital format. W. Jason Atlice, the creator of the project, also needed a way to zoom in on the images, which led him to use a 30mm lens with a 5mm extension.

The reel itself sits on a platform that uses magnets to hold it flat. Underneath is a generic 5V stepper motor that rotates the platform that allows each pane to get scanned. Positioning is tracked with the help of an optical sensor that sends either a low signal for a gap in the wheel or a high one when directly across from a solid point. Finally, there's a ring of LEDs underneath the platform that illuminate the slides for the camera to pick up. Atlice had wanted these to change color based on which corrections needed to be made, but later opted for a software solution instead.

Capturing and processing images

Most of the system's magic is contained within a software package that Atlice wrote called View-Remaster. It is a collection of two applications that allows the user to both capture their images from slides and process them after.

The capture app connects to the Arduino Nano over a COM port. From here, the user can set both the brightness and the color of the ring LEDs by adjusting a slider or through a standard color picking dialog. Once all of these settings have been dialed in, the capture process starts. Each rotation of the ring is followed by a brief illumination of the spotlight and an image is then taken and saved. Each pane is automatically rotated based on a threshold image, and text is extracted via an optical character recognition (OCR) library.

All of these raw images and pieces of text now have to be reviewed manually to ensure proper rotations and translations. Within the Process app, each slide appears as a series of distinct steps, along with a preview of the final result. This is when rotations can be tweaked slightly if the auto-rotator got it wrong. In a similar manner, the automatically extracted text can also be changed if necessary.

Saving the videos

With the images saved as pairs of left and right slides, they have to then get converted into a video. This process is quite simple, as Atlice used a DaVinci Resolve template where he can simply drag and drop all of his images into the editor and then render the video. You can view his Reel3D YouTube channel to see what he was able to capture from his View-Master reels.