A lens that keeps everything in focus (aka, large or infinite depth of field) is not desirable for most photography applications; this mainly has important implications for industrial use. It is always interesting to see innovations in this space.
If all objects are at or beyond the hyperfocal distance, one can focus the lens to infinity and be done with it. All objects will remain in focus regardless of the size of the aperture as all rays incident on the lens from a given object are quasi-parallel.
EDIT: Quasi-parallel from the object, not quasi-parallel to the optic axis.
It depends on the focal length, the chosen aperture, and to some extent on the resolution of the camera.
What I want to say is, if these new lenses transmit light at a high rate (let's say 1:2.8) while being hyperfocal from 0 mm to infinity all the time, you could take pictures at night more easily without having to focus or stop down to get larger scenes fully in focus.
Thus being actually useful in traditional photography.
Landscape photography could be another application.
Hardly. It's namely portraiture that benefits from thin DoF, or similar applications where figure/ground relationship can be improved by keeping OOF elements blurry.
There are a great variety of situations where you do want as much in focus as possible. Landscape and macro photography are the most notable examples, where most high-level images utilize focus-stacking composites to simulate extreme DoF.
Certainly focus depth is a creative tool, but don't confuse expensive wide-aperture lenses for what is necessarily good.
For example http://www.infinityoptics.com.sg/who-we-are/
Not sure if this is a bit too directly commercial for HN, asking re: optics not the whole solution.
Assuming a celllphone-ish sensor in terms of scale and cost (assuming lenses are free) how well can one do in theory? Particularly for iris?
How feasible is it to have iris scanners we don't need to shove our faces into?
Joking aside, I wouldn't doubt this creeping into the film industry or other professional photography. Everything already goes through so much post processing, color correction, etc etc.
I wouldn't call myself anything serious as a photographer; OTOH some serious photographers whom I follow start turning more into 3D artists or videographers.
Photography as a profession seems to be in a crisis: not that it's not needed, it's that many adjacent things (3D, video, design, marketing) are also needed, not unlike in programming: there's almost no such thing as a senior (e.g.) Python developer, there are senior Web, Data, etc. developers which primarily use Python along with other tools (JS, sql, etc).
Amateur astrophotography is a good example of where software is utilized to fill in gaps in the hardware all of the time. Color correction and focus stacking are often done in software, star tracking mounts are using software, and so on.
But yes, the best photographers are generally trained to spot exactly the right framing and composition from the moment the moment the photo is snapped.
Remember when "personal" computers weren't fashionable among "serious" programmers? Or GUIs, or scripting languages, or the web?
Whenever the choice is "software that's only 80% as good" or "more expensive hardware", the former will win every time.