Three-dimensional imaging of the surrounding world, using a single sensor passively registering the incident light, is a classical research topic which has attracted efforts in optics, photography, photogrammetry, computer vision, ophthalmology and other disciplines over the whole 20:th century. In the 90ies, Adelson and Wang, in computer vision, introduced plenoptic cameras.
In the talk, a historic overview of 3D cameras, 3D-imaging (in this sense) will be given. Common denominators will be stressed. We also discuss potentials of some novel techniques.