This was a wonderful, weird thing that my friend Michael showed me one afternoon several years ago. First, a card. A flat cardboard rectangle just the size of a baseball bubblegum card. One side of it was some kind of mylar or hologram silvery surface. He gave me the card and bid me look at it. I did, saw a silvery gas rainbow sort of surface. Michael then handed me some funky looking plastic specs. I put them on, and–ZANG! ZOWIE! There was a monster jumping right out of the card at me! Three dimensional, like it was alive or a jack in the box, this comic-grotesque little dragon.
We had a laugh at my startle and the conversation quickly moved on… .
That was a long time ago and my good friend has left the building (RIP Mr. “A”). I had wanted to bring up the subject of that 3D monster on the bubblegum card and ask him what it was called and so on, but never got around to it and now it’s too late. So I’d like to ask you instead, because someone on this board is bound to know it: like I asked in the title, what on Earth was that thing? Do they still make them? Can I order them somewhere?
PS: I thought Cafe Society would be the appropriate forum to ask about this because it’s about a toy. If it belongs in another part of the board, please move it.
I’m going to need a little more information here. The object you describe doesn’t exactly resemble any 3D item I’m aware of. There are several different ways to make 3D “cards” that don’t produce three dimensional images until you put on special viewing glasses, but I’m not aware of any with a “kind of mylar or hologram silvery surface”. And in all of the cases I know, the 3D object is generally clearly visible before you put on the glasses. I can imagine someone hiding the image in a patter, as in “random dot stereogram” images, or those “Magic eye” (autostereeogram) prints, but usually they don’t.
Here are a few possibilities:
1.) Analglyphic image – this is the simplest and cheapest type of “3D image on a card you have to view with glasses”. The image is printed into colors, and your viewing glasses have “lenses” of corresponding colors (usually red and green, or red and blue). But it doesn’t look silvery, and the image will be obvious unless it’s disguised in the pattern, as I say above. I’ve seen a lot of anaglyphic trading cards.
2.) Vectograph – This used to be the top-of-the-line stereo image you needed glasses for. The card you’re looking at has two images on it, in two different polarizations. You view the card with glasses that have “lenses” that are polarizing filters, whose transmission axes are perpendicular to each other. I suppose you can do it in different ways, with circular polarizers and the like. Again, the subject is usually obvious, even if you’re not wearing glasses. Unless they deliberately hide it in a pattern.
About 20 years ago the Rowland Institute (the research institute Edwin Land – founder of Polaroid – set up) came up with a way to create these on inkjet printers called “Stereojet”. I’ve never seen one, but this might be what you saw
3.) Chromadepth – A very interesting method, in which the image is produced on a screen or printed in color on paper, and viewed through special glasses having microprisms built in. The method works by using the color of the object to determine how far away it appears. In standard Chromadepth glasses, the blue object appear to be farther away than the paper or screen, and red objects appear to be floating in front. Ovjects celsewhere on the spectrum appear to be at various depths. This works extremely well with three-color printing or computer screens, even though there are rteally only three colors present. A unique aspect of this method is that the image looks perfect and sharp even without the glasses. As in most other cases, there’s no “silvery” appearance
4.) Reflection Hologram – This is the only one that sounds like your description. I have some trading cards that look silvery and mylar-like with rainbow-like colors. Viewed under proper illumination, they look perfectly 3D. But no special glasses are needed to view these.
I can’t think of any detailed way to do this off the top of my head, but maybe the image could be viewed without the glasses, but became easier to see with the glasses?
Alternately, is it possible that the image was actually encoded in the glasses, and the card itself was irrelevant (or at least, less-relevant)?