Feasibility of simulating an Imagon lens with depth maps?

Question

The Imagon lens gets its soft focus by being uncorrected for spherical aberration, so the light rays from the outer part of the lens focus at a different spot then those from the center. The degree of softness is controlled by disks with a large central hole and a number of smaller radial holes, which controls how much of the out-of-focus image is blended in.

Up until now, this has been impossible to simulate with a Photoshop plugin. But now that we have digital cameras like the Kinect and recent iPhones that can produce depth maps, I am wondering if you could simulate the Imagon by talking a high depth of field image with a depth map, then creating multiple layers with smaller depths of field, centered at slightly different distances, and merge them to get the same effect.

Does this make any sense?

(I am still bummed that film went out of style before I got comfortable with the 150SF lens on my RZ67, which works the same way as the Imagon.)

Answer 1

The type of cameras which could in theory be used to simulate all kinds of optical effects without simplifying them are lightfield cameras - the ones which record light from multiple directions per each "pixel" separately. With such a camera there is no fixed focus and no fixed DoF anymore.
One example of such camera is Lytro.

Answer 2

The concept of mixing out of focus (uncorrected) periphery images with a sharper small aperture (central opening) image is easily recreated in photoshop; and has been for a very long time.

The effect created by the aperture mask effect (bokeh mask) is much more difficult to recreate; but there is no relationship to the placement of focus per-se. You could not recreate it in the manner you describe.