Recently I posted about some of the 3-D prototypes that have popped up in various auctions this Fall, noting there was a little more that could be shown. Well, here is something that's pretty way out that was part of one trove:
Like, wow man! Isn't that crazy? Here's a closeup of part of the disc:
I really have no idea what's going on there but I like it quite a bit. That disc actually rode atop the three 3-D Soccer prototypes that were recently discussed here. Here's an image of the full page from the marketing book, courtesy of Friend o'the Archive Andrew Wolfe:
As I have
mentioned previously,
Look Magazine was owned by Cowles Communications, who in turn owned the only printing press - via their Visual Panographics subsidiary - able to produce such wonders. At some point Xograph, which had a similar 3-D process, licensed their tech to Cowles. Both Visual Panograhics and Xograph are mentioned on the back stamps of some 1968
Baseball 3-D cards, so I suspect a patent battle was staved off by that, or some specific form of the technology was needed to pull off certain feats.
Xograph, in case you have forgotten, was the trade name for "parallax panoramagram", a particular brand of lenticular technology (other forms were developed by Vari-Vue and Kodak Eastman), so it's an open question as to what was being prepared to show to Topps versus what was being made available to all potential clients.
