In 2023, Washington, D.C.’s Federal City Council approached IDEO to lead a futuring workshop to reimagine the city’s downtown in the post-COVID era. With many government employees now working remotely, the central business district’s identity needed to change. The goal of this workshop was to generate innovative ideas to sustainably bring people back and establish D.C. as a model post-COVID global city.

IDEO decided to guide 100+ stakeholders through a futuring exercise to help them envision city-planning scenarios that might feel out of reach today. As part of this, the team wanted to create a tangible visual experience that felt both nostalgic and forward-looking, and eventually landed on the retrofuturism of that iconic American toy—the View-Master.

The team reached out to me to bring in some AI tools. I’d collaborated with the team’s visual designer on generated imagery before and was excited to prompt engineer together again. Making a View-Master image, of course, means creating stereoscopic images. I’d never done that, but I felt confident that GitHub or Hugging Face would have the answer.

Indeed, I discovered MiDaS, a depth estimation model. From there, I found and forked @m5823779’s stereo image generator so it could run on my M1 Mac (AKA on the CPU instead of CUDA).

Converting images to 3D took only a few seconds per image after I’d installed the Python prerequisites in a virtual environment. Hot tip: Never install Python globally. You will end up reformatting your computer.

The plan from there was to get physical View-Master reels printed, but we needed them for the in-person event in only two weeks. It seemed like that might not be possible.

So, in case we couldn’t find a printer, I built two digital viewer versions. The first (which you can see here) works with the sadly discontinued Mattel View-Master Virtual. The second is a WebXR experience that you can see on any VR headset with a web browser.

While I’m glad I built these (after all, that means I can share them with you!), the magic truly happened when we found Ron Labbe at Studio 3D. Ron was up for the challenge of printing View-Master reels on our compressed timeline and forgave the (hilarious) mistakes our combination of generated imagery and generated 3D-ification created.

He did, however, need higher resolution than I’d produced. Luckily, I already had a copy of  Topaz Gigapixel a really useful upscaling utility.

I found the final results really moving. I’d created the images, seen them in digital 3D through a variety of viewfinders and free viewing, and have a collection of View-Master reels. Yet seeing the film grain and holding the View-Master up to a light helped me not just see, but feel, the future of the D.C. I hope the workshop participants and the rest of the IDEO team felt a little of what I did. It made a future of green spaces, community, and micro mobility seem just a little bit more possible.