NEW PRODUCTS: Foxy Photo

In Manhattan’s R. H. Macy & Co., customers lined up by the hundred this week to have their pictures taken. But these were not ordinary photos; they gave the illusion of being three-dimensional. The new process, called VitaVision, was the latest moneymaker of Matthew Fox, cinemaker and Bub-O-Loon man (TIME, Sept. 22).

Fox got into VitaVision through his longtime friend, Writer-Producer Gene Towne, who had bought the rights to some 200 patents that went into VitaVision. VitaVision requires special cameras, paper and developing process. The key is a thin, transparent plastic screen, in effect a lens, which is laminated to the finished picture. By performing the same optical trick as a stereoscope, it gives the picture the illusion of depth.

So far, VitaVision has turned out only about a dozen cameras. Before long, Fox and Towne hope to make enough to have them snapping portraits in department stores and portrait studios all over the U.S. Soon, the company hopes to make a smaller camera to sell to amateurs, along with a home developing kit. But Fox thinks that the biggest money is in commercial advertising. The company is already making color slides of products to display in stores in specially lighted frames. Among the first customers was Noma Electric Corp. with an order for 50,000 slides.