While modern renderers support advanced and highly realistic materials, geometry, light transport etc., there has been comparatively little focus on realistic cameras, with post-processing often being used instead. This is a shame, since cameras are such an integral part of photography.
But, as of recently, Cycles now supports arbitrarily complex user-defined cameras, so now is the time to look at what can be done with that.
Therefore, this talk will go over the theory behind real and virtual cameras and lenses, the new custom camera feature and some examples of its new possibilities, and finally describe the current state of ongoing work to simulate real lenses with accurate bokeh, distortion, vignetting, dispersion etc.