Part of Zeiss Ikon's exploration of stereo-cinematography or Raumfilm which had already involved producing equipment for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, this camera is a unique surviving example of its type and a testament to late 1930s German technical prowess.

The camera uses a rhomboid prism to rotate a left and right eye stereo pair through 90 degrees and place them on a single strip of 35mm. film. The Sterikon K lens included with the outfit restores the images on projection into a correctly-orientated stereo-pair, which can be viewed with polarising glasses to create, in the mind of the observer, a single image with the appearance of depth.

The four cameras originally produced were used to shoot the first 3D film using the polarising system of stereo-cinematography, Zum Greifen Nahe (You Can Nearly Touch It), which was premiered in Berlin in December 1937. This camera, the only one now extant, survived the Second World War in secret underground storage.