This thesis discusses the physical and information theoretical limits of optical 3D metrology, and, based on these principal considerations, introduces a novel single-shot 3D video camera that works close to these limits. There are serious obstacles for a “perfect” 3D-camera: The author explains that it is impossible to achieve a data density better than one third of the available video pixels. Available single-shot 3D cameras yet display much lower data density, because there is one more ...