Lenses are fun and collectable and all, but I think my idea of a near perfect camera would be a one piece waterproof superzoom with depth capture and AI processing. Less to fuss with, and you can carry all your virtual lenses everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_field_camera
It would be cool to see a traditional SLR/mirrorless with a depth sensor, indeed!
Otherwise there's what we call focus bracketing/stacking which can also allow us to focus in prod.
However, there's usually only one good focus point, so we can do that while taking the picture...
For a simple example, they still mess up the whiskers on a kitty and even for portraits of people it’s super obvious that it’s an artificial image.
This one is super interesting to me - clearly Snapchat, Google, Apple, and I assume Samsung have proved that this is viable.
While some features (e.g. portrait mode) exist to work around limitations that many lenses don't have (ability to create a shallow DoF) other ones are more interesting, i.e. Snapchat filters.
Still, I worry that these are too difficult to reason about as compared to something like the exposure triangle, and the imperfections of things like portrait mode can be very obvious. Perhaps these are better left to post-processing tools?
There's a parallel in the advent of stacking being a massive boon for amateur astrophotography. There, the natural format for unprocessed data is video, hours of which are recorded in-camera and processed afterwards. Perhaps someday a new RAW-over-time format will be developed to hold the raw data of multiple sensors, optical and otherwise, to enable smartphone processing after the fact.
"Super resolution" may be the marketing term to search for to investigate your interest. However sequential image composite decononvolution hasn't solved for usually desired out of focus transition effects commonly hand waved as " bokeh" because the important contrast gradient limit of the Airy Disc is convolution.
Accelerometers are appearing even in the lowest budget cinema cameras whilst ARRI, the de facto market leader who used to be the left field upstart (finishing The Bridge Over The River Kwai, critically being inexpensive light and ergonomic of which only ergonomic is arguably retained by contemporary boxes) has just gotten around to putting one in a smaller sensor camera that costs six times the bigger sensor competition. (I'll ignore the 3:2 vs 4:3 ratio of the newest ARRI is wonderful for anamorphic squeeze and utterly wasted for spherical shooting.. and ignore RED offering very usable ratio comprises.
Edit: disc not discussion