Oh I think I saw a picture of that compared to a normal VHS cassette online the other day. But I didn’t know what it was.

We had an Ampex D-2 unit that was nicknamed the dishwasher for its size. Supposedly, there was a demo of the error correction abilities of the unit where the tape had a hole punched in it yet no concealment errors visible when playing frame by frame. They also had the demo rigged up to be able to rotate the machine to be inverted while connected to scopes to show now stable the transport was. I never saw any of these myself, and only heard of these 3rd person style, hence the supposedly. It was large enough to hold a 3 hour cassette. The smaller Sony unit could only hold 2 hour cassettes