[makizar]

Could you ELI5 what the applications would be ? Could a render engine be built on top of this and hooked up to a DCC like Blender ? Or is this a way to do computational photography, say correct the depth of field of an image of "denoise" it ?

[fouronnes3]

The main application is designing optical systems. Say you want to build a camera lens. Modern camera lenses are made of multiple individual lenses, sometimes up to 12 or more pieces stacked together. Everything from the shape of the lens surfaces, to the exact materials and gaps between the pieces has to be precisely calculated so that light ends up where you want to!