X-ray specs...

I went to the cinema at the weekend to see Avatar in 3D – amazing, both the film and the unbelievable 3D-ness of the film.

As a friend of mine said – ‘Nothing new about the story, it's basically Pocahontas but the re-imaging of it via 3D, enhanced rendering and motion capture certainly raises the bar’. It does indeed, so much better than the fuzzy image of old style 3D and those red and green , paper and plastic glasses I remember wearing on the couple of occasions I’ve watched 3D films in the past.

The new 3D glasses just look like sunglasses, I’ve no idea how they work, any more than I understood how the X-ray specs I longed for as a kid worked either - all I knew was that I wanted a pair. X-Ray Specs were advertised in the back of the Superman comics I used to buy, American imports, hard to get hold of and expensive, but the small ads advertised all manner of wonders – silent dog whistles, teach yourself hypnotism , exploding fountain pens, buzzing hand-shakes, sneezing powder, clacking teeth, secret agent miniature cameras, sea monkeys, and of course the much longed for X-ray specs.

X-ray specs claimed to allow the wearer to see through or into solid objects, like in the Ray Milland film ‘The Man with the X-Ray Eyes’. I must have watched that film half a dozen times envying his ability to see through skin and even clothing! Like the slogan said ‘See the bones in your hand, see through clothes!’ and all for only a dollar!

Only two things stopped me from sending for a pair – I didn’t have a dollar (and not much hope of getting hold of one in 1960’s rural Oxfordshire) and I didn’t have a clue as to what a zip code was (zips had more to do with dresses than addresses didn't they?). So all I could do was dream of the day when X-ray specs would be available in England.

I now know that the glasses weren't as magical as they appeared to be and simply created a bit of an optical illusion, no X-rays were involved, and you couldn't really see through skin or clothing. The magic specs were just a pair of outsized plastic frames with white cardboard "lenses" that had red concentric circles printed on them. The lenses consisted of two layers of cardboard with a small hole about a quarter of an inch wide punched through both layers. A feather was stuck between the layers of each 'lens' with the individual strands of the feather placed so closely together that they diffracted the light, causing the user to see two slightly offset images through the holes. So, if you were looking at a matchbox, you would see two offset images of the matchbox and not the matches inside the box - it was just that where the images overlapped, a darker image appeared giving the effect of an outer and inner layer.

How dissapointed I would have been if I'd got hold of that dollar somehow and managed to find out what a zip code was and then found that my X-ray specs wouldn't let me see through Sarah Flynn's blouse after all.

Oh well, 3D at the cinema is now a reality so who knows? Perhaps one day soon I'll be able to buy a pair of X-ray Specs that really let me see the bones in my hand and see through clothes! - I can hardly wait.