Far-sighted Glasses Wearers and 3Discover

[P3D Oliver Dean <3d-image@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since I can't use contact lenses, I am a wearer of glasses for
far-sightedness, which is a trial when I am using fixed-focus viewers,
because the glasses push my eyes so far back from the viewer that I
can't see the whole image.  If I take off the glasses so as to see the
whole image, it's out of focus.  Small supplementary lenses for the
viewer might work, but would be a hassle to fit to the viewer and would
have to be removed when sharing the viewer with a normally sighted
person.

I was afraid that the 3Discover, being a non-focusing viewer, would
involve the same frustration; happily, I have DDDiscovered a work-around
which, while a bit clumsy, still enables me to enjoy the full sweep of
the wide-angle 3Discover views in perfect focus!  

The trick:  Take off your glasses; then, if you push away from you with
your thumbs on the two film receptacles on each side of the cassette so
that the cassette pops loose from the viewer as though you were going to
remove it, you'll find that there is room for you to slide the entire
cassette back and forth without removing it from the viewer.  This
enables you to focus the current view rather quickly, with a little
practice.  

It's clumsy, of course, because you have to snap the cassette back into
place in order to advance to the next view, and then you have to unsnap
and focus all over again, but it does at least enable you to enjoy the
views the way they were meant to be seen.  A rewarding by-product of
this method is that the graininess of the diffuser seems to disappear
into unsharpness as the cassette is moved away from you when you bring
the film image into focus.

The only drawback I have experienced is that when the cassette is popped
loose, disconnecting the film from the locked-in-place gear, sometimes
the springiness of the film causes the pair of images to shift slightly
to the right or left in the cassette, thereby cutting off one side of
the view a tad.  But this seems to happen rarely, and even when it does
happen, very little of the view is lost.

Small, snap-on supplementary lenses in various diopters might be a more
convenient solution in the long run, I guess, but at least this method
is one you can use right now.  If you have to wear glasses for simple
far-sightedness, go try it!

Meanwhile, if anyone comes up with CONVENIENT, SMALL supplementary
lenses of about 4.0 diopters that snap on and off the viewer, I would be
interested.

Cordially,
-- 
Oliver Dean -- 3d-image@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dominguez Hills (near Los Angeles), Calloushernia, USA


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