Is it possible to make an optically functional camera lens in cycles? I am interested and intrigued at the idea of designing a camera lens (or camera lenses) in Blender, that would function optically like "normal" camera lenses and project an image on a plane.

By "optically functional camera lens", I mean something like this, where the image of the scene comes into the lens and out the other end onto a plane (image courtesy of this site):



This is not a tutorial request, I am just asking before I get into this time-consuming project if someone knows whether or not this would technically work or if it wouldn't, because of the current limitations of Blender's caustics simulator (and yes, I understand that the rendering could take a very long time...). I am not extremely knowledgeable about optics and cannot tell if the two are related.

Oddly (or maybe just because people aren't masochists), I can't find much on the subject, besides from this old post with broken links.
I already tried things like this, but on a much smaller scale. If you want to be sure that your project works, you should try Luxrender because it is based on a physical simulation.