Alongside the technical sessions, the conference has its own keynote presentation, a popular demonstration session (where a range of stereoscopic 3D technologies can be seen in one place at one time), the 3D theater (where the latest stereoscopic content is shown), and a discussion forum.
SD&A was founded in 1990 by John O. Merritt and Scott Fisher, and has been held annually since.
Holography pioneer Stephen Benton was also an SD&A conference chair from 2000 until his death in 2003.
Over the period 1990 to 2015, SD&A and the Electronic Imaging Symposium were jointly organized by IS&T and SPIE.
A detailed listing of the conference program for every year since 1996 is available on the official SD&A website.
The DVD-ROM compilation "Stereoscopic Displays and Applications 1990-2009: A Complete 20-Year Retrospective - and The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 1994-2009 (CDP51)"[3] released in 2010 represents a technical knowledge base across stereoscopic 3D and VR topics containing the complete technical record of the Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference (1990-2009), The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality conference (1994-2009), and papers from a selection of ten other 3D related SPIE conferences (1977-1989) predating SD&A.