The Eastman Kodak Company sponsored Magic Journeys (1982), a 70mm 3-D theater attraction for the opening of EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. This children’s fantasy film, designed to highlight the new format’s technological innovations, was directed by Academy Award winner Murray Lerner. During early pre-production, Disney Studios searched existing 3-D camera systems, including one built for Todd-AO by Panavision, but when none proved adequate for the film’s needs, they realized they would have to create their own system. Of primary interest was the higher resolution and brighter screen images available in a 70mm format that minimized the headaches and eye fatigue that plagued previous 3-D presentations.

Historically, stereo photography has tried to match the actual separation of human eyes, but such a horizontal configuration of large and bulky 65mm cameras was never going to work. The favored arrangement was a vertical configuration of cameras and lenses. One camera is mounted pointing straight down and shoots into a 45-degree partially-silvered mirror. The second camera is mounted horizontally and shoots out through the same mirror. This design allowed for the lenses that could be positioned close to the human interocular (pupil-to-pupil distance) of 2.5 in (6.35cm).

Steve Hines, an engineer at WED, fabricated the original design, then worked with Bob Otto and Don Iwerks of the Disney studio machine shop in the final development of what became known informally as “the Hines rig”. Hines’s innovation allowed for the vertical (right-eye) camera to remain stationary while the second (left-eye) camera could be adjusted by a four-bar mechanical linkage within its hollowed-out base-plate. Changes could be made during photography to the interaxial distance, ranging from zero to 4 in (10.16cm) to create different perspective effects, such as making objects appear smaller, or larger, than lifesize. The left camera could also be shifted to “toe-in”, to adjust convergence – positioning objects in 3-D space from behind the screen (positive parallax) to well in front (negative parallax). Among the rig’s achievements was that these two adjustments – interaxial spacing and lens convergence – could be made independently of each other.

This rig would be required to do a lot that was innovative, because Lerner’s film called for scenes with blue screen, underwater shots, miniatures, macro, high-speed and time-lapse – all in high-fidelity imagery projected onto a 54-ft-wide (16.46m) screen. Eventually, other dual-camera rigs had to be built for the production: in addition to the main studio camera, a special set-up with a 12-ft (3.66m) interaxial distance was used for very wide vistas and clouds; and a side-by-side aerial rig for filming from a helicopter, with zero parallax (convergence being added and adjusted in post-production). A rig built by Ernie McNabb of the National Film Board of Canada, which had been used on a previous Lerner 3-D film, was modified for underwater photography. Magic Journeys set a high standard for future 3-D films, premiering at the opening of EPCOT Center, Florida, on October 1, 1982. The show also played at Disneyland, California, Tokyo Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom, Florida – finally closing for good in 1993. 

The film that replaced Magic Journeys was an even more complex production, Captain EO (1986), a musical science-fiction short, starring Michael Jackson, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and produced by George Lucas. In the past, making adjustments to the convergence and/or interaxial distance required downtime between set-ups – charts had to be consulted, as changing one variable could influence the other. While the original Disney rig had controls to make these changes independently and “on the fly”, the controls used pantograph linkages (using mechanical parallelograms) which were not always accurate, nor user-friendly. Starting with Captain EO, these adjustments were improved upon by cameraman Peter Anderson’s designs – replacing convergence and interaxial mechanisms with a single handheld zoom controller. When a second 3-D rig was needed for the show’s elaborate dance and action scenes, the production brought in the flat-plate dual-camera rig originally built by Todd-AO, even though its convergence and interaxial distances had to be set manually. 

Captain EO played at EPCOT, Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland and Disneyland Paris, closing during the late 1990s – replaced by Jim Henson's Muppet*Vision 3D. Among the innovations of the new film were the incorporation of in-theater 4-D effects, such as Audio Animatronics figures and elements like smoke and real soap bubbles. Honey, I Shrunk the Audience (1994), directed by Randal Kleiser, used the inherent flexibility of the rig’s ability to change interaxial spacing (lens divergence) to play with the viewer’s sense of scale of objects. After the death of Michael Jackson in 2009, a “Captain EO Tribute” was brought back to play in its original venues between 2010 and 2015. In keeping with Disney Imagineering traditions, all these theme park theatrical presentations were designed to be under 20 minutes long, to facilitate a daily three-shows-per-hour schedule.