Apple CEO Tim Cook has been showing vested interest for months now: "AR can be really great and we have been and continue to invest a lot in this," Cook said back in July. "We are high on AR for the long run. We think there are great things for customers and a great commercial opportunity." In addition, a

report from November said that Apple had already ordered "small quantities of near-eye displays from one supplier for testing."

Apple has also made a number of high-profile hires —Yury Petrov of Oculus VR, and Zeyu Li, an engineer from the Augmented Reality-centric startup Magic Leap—which would align quite nicely with any future AR plans. According to Scoble, the glasses may be ready as soon as this year, but his previous prediction was market-readiness by 2018. Apple is so far refusing to comment on any of this hype, so we'll just have to wait and see for ourselves if the rumors are true.

A juicy new rumor has dropped on Facebook—and it may mean that Apple Augmented Reality is in our future. Augmented and virtual reality tech expert Robert Scoble started his post from the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show with "Exclusive news," and it only got better from there.Apparently, a "Zeiss employee confirms" that "Apple and Carl Zeiss AG are working on a light pair of augmented reality/ mixed reality glasses that may be announced this year." For those who don't know, the difference between augmented and virtual reality is a small but significant one—AR overlays data with the real world, like in Pokemon Go, whereas VR completely submerses the user in an entirely different world. Carl Zeiss, rumored Apple partner, is a German optics powerhouse.Though Scoble has a mixed record with predicting Apple's future products, this particular rumor isn't unfounded, either. This is the second time in a matter of months that talk of Apple AR has popped up. According to an article in Forbes