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I just want flat lenses for my glasses :-)

A very very long time ago the lab adjacent to the one I worked in was investigating if light passing through a holographic lens was bent in the same way as light traveling through a physical lens[1]. It was a super neat idea at the time. That was long before the whole meta-material craze hit.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1457205

To FwarkTheNark, it's a meta material lens, hence metalens.
It sounds like the lens doesn't change it's focal length, but the focal length is a function of the light polarization. So you can just rotate a polarizing filter to change the focal length.
I wonder if this has any weird artifacts because of natural polarized light in nature?

for example, I have a pair of polarized sunglasses where the left and right lenses seem to be polarized at different angles.

When I look at clouds, they look strange because the light from them seems to be polarized - and the image I get from each eye is different. So the cloud doesn't converge in my vision.

(that said, I don't understand circular polarizing filters at all, if that is in play)