Developing head-mounted displays (HMDs) that offer uncompromised optical pathways to both digital and physical worlds without encumbrance and discomfort confronts many grand challenges, both from technological perspectives and human factors. Among the many challenges, minimizing visual discomfort is one of the key obstacles. One of the key contributing factors to visual discomfort is the lack of the ability to render proper focus cues in HMDs to stimulate natural eye accommodation responses, which leads to the wellknown problem of vergence–accommodation conflict. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of various technical approaches toward enabling focus cues in HMDs for both virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) applications.