Machine vision solutions that acquire and process depth information have grown from niche applications to more general and wide-spread usage. With the advent of multi-purpose industrial 3D cameras and data processing performance, 3D machine vision is now addressing increasingly complex tasks in automation, but also in different settings that require great flexibility, e.g., autonomous navigation and obstacle detection, or assistance and service robotics. This presentation gives an overview of related developments in sensing technology and machine vision algorithms and how they enable applications.