GoKawiil
Tech News
Sony has announced that Mafia: The Old Country, Horizon Forbidden West and Poppy Playtime: Chapter 2 are joining the PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium catalogs. Most titles arrive October 20, with Poppy Playtime: Chapter 2 following on October 27. PlayStation Plus plans start at $11 a month and include access to a rotating library of games.
Amazon is selling the Oura Ring Gen 3 Horizon in Gold for $269.99, marking an $80 reduction from its usual price. The smart ring tracks sleep and other health metrics.
Google has released Playground through Google Labs, letting users type plain-language prompts to generate playable in-browser games, with options to refine designs or upload reference images, videos, or models. The tool builds on Google's practice of testing experimental AI products via Labs before wider release, and follows a similar game-generation feature Meta introduced in September called Horizon Create.
Playground Games will bring Forza Horizon 6 to PlayStation 5 on January 26, slightly later than its originally planned 2025 window. The PS5 release will include a Premium Edition option with early access, and will launch alongside the game's first expansion.
Playground Games has delayed the PS5 launch of Forza Horizon 6, originally slated for 2026, to January 26th, 2027. The PS5 debut will now align with the rollout of a new game expansion, which will also arrive on Xbox and PC that same month. A Premium Edition will offer PS5 players up to five days of early access.
The Meta Quest 3S with 128GB storage is available at a reduced price of $297.49 through the end of Amazon’s October Prime Day sale, down from $349.99. The headset features the same chipset as the Quest 3 but has slightly lower display quality, making it a cost-effective option for casual VR users. Buyers also receive three months of Horizon Plus for access to a broad selection of games.
Xreal has started taking pre-orders for the Aura, a transparent-lens XR headset built with Google on Android XR, priced at $1,279 for a 12GB/256GB model and $1,499 for a 16GB/512GB version. The device runs on a Qualcomm Snapdragon Reality Elite chip housed in a separate compute puck, and relies on a touchpad plus hand-tracking rather than eye tracking for navigation.
A gaming guide outlines several ways to improve frames per second without buying new components, including lowering in-game graphics settings like texture quality and shadows, disabling motion blur and V-sync, and capping frame rate via NVIDIA or AMD software. It also recommends closing recording tools, keeping GPU drivers updated, and switching Windows 11's power plan to Best Performance mode.
Meta is opening early access to two new AI tools, a mobile app called Horizon Create and a browser-based Horizon Studio, that let creators generate 2D or 3D mobile games from text prompts. The generated games can include multiplayer, progression systems, art direction and difficulty balancing, and can be edited after an initial version is produced. Meta says these games will also be playable directly inside Facebook and Instagram feeds without downloading a separate app.
Meta introduced two new tools, a mobile app called Horizon Create and a browser-based Horizon Studio, that let users build games for its Horizon platform using AI prompts. Both are launching in early access with a waitlist, and Meta says games made with these tools can be surfaced and played directly within Facebook and Instagram feeds without downloads.
Meta announced its Connect 2026 conference will run September 23-24, where it plans to showcase advances in AI, smart glasses and VR. The event is free to watch via livestream after registering on Meta's website or through the Meta for Developers Facebook page, with sessions starting September 23 at 7PM ET and continuing September 24 at 1PM ET.
A researcher at Slovenia's InnoRenew Centre of Excellence describes winning a nearly €2 million European Research Council grant to develop self-repairing, UV-protective fungal-biofilm coatings for buildings. The five-year award, secured after a lengthy application and resubmission process, immediately reshaped the scope of her research group's work and her own daily responsibilities, shifting her focus from hands-on experiments toward managing people and projects.