Jefferson Graham counts down the 7 top tech innovations of 2016, starting with Pokemon Go, on #TalkingTech

LOS ANGELES — There was lots of talk about virtual reality in 2016, but most of it was looking forward to trends that might come true in a few years. The real action, however, was in another form of reality, the augmented kind.

AR, or augmented reality, tops our annual list of tech innovations for 2016, highlighted, of course, by the Pokémon Go app, and all those crazy filters we added to our Snapchat photos.

Snapchat, the app originally beloved for sending photos that could disappear within 10 seconds, has expanded into a service some 150 million visit daily, fueled by the selfie lens, where you can add cat ears and rainbow tongues to your photos and videos. In November, it went one step further with the introduction of “World Lenses,” which put smiles onto ordinary clouds in the background of your photo, or add falling rain or snow to an image.

The red-hot Spectacles video glasses, released at the end of the year, don’t have AR—you shoot regular 10-second video clips that can be viewed on Snapchat. But it’s not hard to imagine what the product could morph into eventually with AR.

This, for all its silliness, is augmented reality, a far cry from costly, immersive virtual-reality headsets produced by Facebook's Oculus, Samsung, HTC and Google. While these all won praise for their quality, they've lacked the "killer app" that's made everyone — from nephews to grandmothers — want to try it.

Not so with augmented reality, as the raging popularity of Pokémon Go attested.