“3D” imaging has been around for a long time in fact. However it should be noted that in the past it was usually necessary to “layer” flat images at varying depths in the image composition in order to “simulate” 3D effects once printed on special materials. There was also a rather difficult system using 2 or more film cameras that were used in past to generate photos of the scene from various angles, but there was not really any dedicated software to then handle those photos to generate a seamless 3D image.
3D images were produced from those older systems but they were of limited use due to the complexity of the process. Digital technology has changed that now as the new digital cameras, computers and software have enough power now to process the huge amounts of data/pixels that are necessary in the capture and generation of 3D photos.