The inaugural Stereoscopic Displays and Applications (SD&A) conference was held in February 1990 at the Santa Clara Convention Centre in Silicon Valley, California. For the past 30 years the SD&A conference has been held every year in the San Francisco Bay Area, up and down the San Francisco Peninsula, and over that period has brought together researchers from across a broad range of disciplines, and from locations world-wide, to report on their contributions to advancements in the field of stereoscopic imaging. The conference has supported a large community of researchers over time who have collectively presented and published a wealth of global knowledge in this subject area. In this paper we look at the impact of the conference in its first 30 years through an analysis of the conference’s published papers and an analysis of the citations of those papers. We also review some actions that conference organizers can take to help build communities of knowledge around conferences.