Hacking the McD's Stereoscope


As everyone rushes toward the emerging VR market there are some clever attempts to provide people with a 3D environment, some lower tech than others. When I visited my brother-in-law's I noticed McDonald's attempt at VR for kids, a stereoscope viewer! You can buy the Happy Meal toy without the meal, so I picked one up, too. It came with a set of LEGO Bat Girl stereoscope cards which seemed easy enough to duplicate and add my own images.

I used a Silhouette Cameo and the bundled software to create my own blank cards.


I took photos of my desk and some of the organisms in the tanks in the middle division science lab with my phone. The images were taken by moving the camera slightly to one side between shots. 





I sized the images on my Mac to fit on the cards and printed them on a color printer. I cut out the images and taped them to the cards.


The 3D effect worked perfectly! I could virtually sit at my desk any time! Seriously, the stereoscope effect worked well without the need to be super precise about the photo, so long as there was a couple inches offset between the two photos, as you can see in the photo above.

Personalizing content for a consumer product is part of the hacker ethic. Instead of being limited by the content provided by the toy maker, find ways to re-purpose a toy to make the content personally meaningful and demonstrative of your own interests! Instead of a dead end toy, you can create a content platform!

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