Report: Apple, Carl Zeiss Developing Smart Glasses

Apple and Carl Zeiss AG are developing a pair of smart glasses, according to blogger Robert Scoble.

Citing an unnamed Zeiss employee, Scoble tipped a "light pair of augmented reality/mixed reality glasses that may be announced this year."

Scoble said he goaded Zeiss representatives at last week's Consumer Electronics Show into confirming the German manufacturer is working with Apple.

"And that explains why there was no augmented reality in Zeiss's booth even though it was right in the middle of the AR area," he wrote in a Monday Facebook post.

Scoble initially expected the specs to launch in 2018—a date recently corroborated by Bloomberg. The news site in November described an augmented reality device that wirelessly connects to an iPhone to display information in the user's field of vision.

But based on Zeiss's presence at CES 2017, Scoble believes the glasses will debut this year.

A Zeiss spokesman declined to comment on the report; Apple did not immediately respond to PCMag's request for comment.

Rumors first surfaced nearly two years ago, suggesting that Cupertino is working on a wearable augmented reality product—for which the company won a patent in June.

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Meanwhile, word spread early last year that Apple is secretly putting together a VR and AR research team, which has already constructed prototype headsets.

CEO Tim Cook is certainly enthusiastic about the technology, telling ABC's Robin Roberts in the fall that AR "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," and calling virtual reality "really cool."

For more, see CES: Looking Through Augmented Reality Glasses at Our Enterprise Future.