The use of laser Doppler vibrometry (LDVi) offers great potential for the improvement of the investigation capability of experimental vibration testing. Because of this, this technique is studied and applied with increasing interest in several industrial and scientific areas of research, including biomedical engineering. In particular, the traditional fields of vibration testing, such as damage detection, system identification, and model updating, benefit from the use of these novel techniques. In fact, they significantly extend measurement capabilities with respect to traditional accelerometers, as they allow remote, nonintrusive, high-spatial resolution measurements with reduced testing time and increased performances (bandwidth up to 200 kHz, velocity range of ±10 m/s, resolution of about 8 nm in displacement and 0.5 μm/s in velocity). In this work, the state of the art in LDVi technique is addressed, and the new instrument configurations, such as those for in-plane and rotational vibration measurements, are described. A review of the most innovative LDVi advances is presented with reference to recent publications, and the different methodologies are categorized according to their relative fields of application. Interesting results achieved by continuously controlling the movement of scanning LDVi mirrors are shown: measurements in tracking mode on rotating objects or continuous scanning for operational mode shapes determination are examples of these activities. Also, actual limits and fields of future research are discussed. The main limitations in LDVi instrumentation are actually represented by speckle effects and poor signal-to-noise ratio when measuring on low diffusive surfaces. For these problems, the research is continuing to develop, and important improvements are expected within the next few years.