Dave Machin’s hobby collecting View-Master 3D toys started by chance when he picked one up at an antique shop in San Luis Obispo. He clicked through travel reels of destinations like Yosemite, Chicago, and Miami.
“What occurred to me was that these are now antiques, so all these pictures of these places were like 70 or 80 years old,” Machin told the Sun. “It started to get really interesting to look at what has changed from then to now in these pictures. So, there’s stuff in the pictures that don’t exist anymore.”
Inside the collection
Watch Dave Machin’s travel videos and his View-Master 3D documentary on his YouTube channel, View Master Travels. His online database of reels is available to browse at vmdatabase.com.
He manually converted his stockpile of vintage viewers and reels into a large online database to occupy his mind during the pandemic. Then, an idea for a project sparked.
Since View-Master initially began by selling travel postcards for people to experience exotic places, Machin had the idea to try to find the locations and document what’s changed.
On his YouTube channel, View Master Travels, Machin posts travel vlogs that compare scenes from decades ago with his 21st century photographs. The retiree became so invested in the devices that he started conducting in-depth research and released a film with his findings in September.
“I decided to put the whole thing together into one long, full-length documentary movie and kind of realized, I don’t think anybody’s ever done that before,” Machin said.
His first published View Master Travels adventure was to Santa Catalina Island five years ago. On the ferry ride over, Machin remembered one specific View-Master reel in his collection with photos of the island.
“I looked it up, and we just spent the day going to exactly the same spots that all the pictures were taken back in 1947 and seeing what things looked like now. There were all these neat changes, like there used to be penguins on Catalina Island in a big zoo,” Machin said.
The View-Master reels are labeled, and if he’s lucky, there’s an accurate description of the photo subject. Otherwise, Machin spends hours online before his travels hunting down GPS coordinates. He’ll look at street view perspectives on Google Maps, identifying any remaining buildings in an attempt to match modern architecture to the historic images.
“Part of what has been fun with the travel videos was doing all the historical research and learning stuff that I definitely didn’t know. I mean, there’s probably 100 cool things I could go on and on about. Any one of these places I visit, there’s tons of neat, historical facts I learn,” Machin said.
So far, he’s uploaded 50 travel videos of locations including Seattle, Solvang, Las Vegas, Niagara Falls, and Montreal. He gives the audience a peek into his collection of thousands of reels, revealing today’s footage next to the faded, historic images.
‘I decided to put the whole thing together into one long, full-length documentary movie and kind of realized, I don’t think anybody’s ever done that before.’
—Dave Machin, View-Master 3D collector
Ideas for a documentary about View-Master 3D sparked when the daughter of the toy’s inventor commented on one of Machin’s YouTube videos. She sent Machin a copy of the biography she penned about her father, William Gruber, a German, after discovering his diaries in a safe upon his passing.
“It turns out he joined the Nazi Party,” Machin explained. “Then he moved to America, and he started to run what would become the American arm of the Nazi Party.”
Gruber unveiled the View-Master at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and it took off from there with wild success, eventually passing to different owners.
Machin made the documentary in phases, not intending to produce a full movie at first. He interviewed Gruber’s daughter and then one of the company’s 3D cartoonists.
Drawing for three dimensions is a lost art. View-Master devices blend two slightly different images for each eye that create depth in the brain, giving a 3D effect. Machin wanted to know how artists created the images and how the reels were manufactured.
“This guy reached out, and he’s like, ‘Hey, I see you’re making a video about how this used to work. I’m the guy who used to do this. I was the guy in the ’80s that drew the 3D cartoons,’” Machin said. “So, I interviewed him, and his name’s John Kurtz. I think he’s probably the last living person who knows how this was done because the technologies behind it are lost because everything went digital in the ’90s.”
It’d take days just to sketch one reel in perfect 3D. Then the artist would color it in with paint.
“Nowadays, you do it on a computer. You just kind of hit a button, and that was weeks of work,” Machin said.
He has between 3,000 and 4,000 reels in his View-Master collection and 30 or 40 viewing devices. With seven 3D images on each disk, Machin has loaded more than 21,000 images into his online database since he started the hobby six years ago. He believes it’s the largest collection of its kind in the world.
“There are people who have larger collections than I do, but I don’t think anybody has the images that are on the reels available online other than my collection, which is kind of neat,” Machin said.
None of this would’ve started had he not stumbled upon a View-Master 3D in the antique shop years ago. However, what got him hooked wasn’t simply the pictures of nature.
The last few images on one of the reels were a woman’s personal photos circa the 1940s in 3D and color. She stood outside of her house by a bank and an orange tree.
“I got the bug in my head even then. I’m like, ‘I wonder where she used to live. How did it get in this antique shop in San Luis?’ And I was trying to match the mountains from her view and the bank, and I was trying to read the street signs,” Machin remembered. “I kind of figured out it was in LA and at this intersection. The bank is kind of still there.”
In that moment, Machin realized View-Masters are much more than toys.
“It’s like totally going back in time.”
Have a cool, uncommon, artsy hobby? Tell Staff Writer Madison White all about it at mwhite@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in October 22 – October 29, 2026.
