Apple augmented reality glasses? It's a possibility

LOS ANGELES — Apple may be looking to follow young rival Snap by selling trendy digital glasses, according to a new report in Bloomberg.

Snap's Spectacles video sunglasses debuted last week, via a bright yellow vending machine, and have quickly sold out limited supply. Bloomberg says Apple's glasses, still in the exploratory phase, would connect to iPhones, and use augmented reality to show different images, similar to how Snapchat filters work with photos. The filters use AR to super-impose images of rain, snow and the like over the smartphone photo.

If Apple does get into AR, it will be late to the party. Bloomberg says the glasses wouldn't arrive until 2018 at the earliest.

AR is quickly being seen as the more marketable twist on virtual reality, one that can be enjoyed without connecting to a headset.

"My own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far, because this gives the capability for both of us to sit and be very present talking to each other, but also have other things visually for both of us to see," Apple CEO Tim Cook said in September, in an interview with ABC's Good Morning, America.

"Maybe it's something we're talking about, maybe it's someone else here that is not here, present, but could be made to appear to be present with us. So there's a lot of really cool things there."

Apple's rivals are high on VR — Google last week introduced Daydream, a new $80 headset with superior image quality to the $15 Google Cardboard, while Facebook is invested in VR via the Oculus system. Oculus competes with Sony, which introduced the competitive PlayStation VR.

Follow USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham.