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Viewmaster goes VR

This holiday season, the classic toy is getting a fancy upgrade with help from Google.

This Black Friday, everything old is new again.

Remember the Mattel Viewmaster from your childhood?

You’d put those round little picture reels in it, and click through to see 3-D images of animals and the pyramids in Egypt and all sorts of cool places and things. It debuted in 1939, at the World’s Fair, and you could argue it was kind of a very early virtual reality viewer.

Which is why it makes so much sense that the Viewmaster is coming back this year as an actual VR headset for kids.

Apparently, the Viewmaster has never really gone away over the last 77 years. AdWeek reported that Mattel consulted with Google on the next-generation Viewmaster.

It goes on sale next month, with content from National Geographic and NASA. And yes, it still comes on little disk reels, just like the original.

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