Author Archives: Xordac Prime

Security updates for Thursday

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Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (corosync, gawk, gdb, nodejs24, and thunderbird), Debian (expat, firefox-esr, libsmpp34, mkvtoolnix, network-manager-l2tp, pgextwlist, python-django, ruby-oj, and tor), Fedora (apptainer, ckermit, ffmpeg, freerdp, librabbitmq, openbao, php, python-cssselect2, python-uv-build, ruff, rust-libcst, rust-libcst_derive, rust-salsa, rust-salsa-macro-rules, rust-salsa-macros, sos, ty, uv, weasyprint, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Mageia (python-pillow), Red Hat (acl, glib2, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, libxml2, mingw-sqlite, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, nodejs24, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, sqlite, tesseract, and vim), Slackware (libpng and mozilla-thunderbird), SUSE (alloy, chromedriver, emacs, gdb, gimp, gpsd, jawn, libpoppler-cpp3, libtesseract5, multipath-tools, netty, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, pcapplusplus-devel, pi-coding-agent, python-PyYAML, python-tornado, python-tornado6, python311, python313, and wicked2nm), and Ubuntu (designate, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gvfs, imagemagick, kdenlive, mlt, keystone, libauthen-sasl-perl, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-oracle-7.0, opensbi, openvpn, and python-django).

Will Microsoft Sell Xbox? Gaming Chief Asha Sharma Breaks Silence On Spinoff Rumors

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Will Microsoft Sell Xbox? Gaming Chief Asha Sharma Breaks Silence On Spinoff Rumors
Following the announcement that Microsoft would be slashing hundreds of jobs across Halo Studios, other first-party studios, and the Xbox Gaming Studios management and central functions layer, it was fair to question if the company might consider selling its Xbox division. Despite the rumors, however, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma insists that no such

A New Walk-In Attraction Brings The House Of The Dead To VR

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Sega has released a teaser video revealing a new, large-scale VR arcade attraction in its long-running The House of the Dead series.

Sega Amusements has unveiled a new immersive VR game in the The House of the Dead series. “The House of the Dead: Reawakened” is described as a two-player VR experience that brings players physically inside a Gothic manor, complete with doors and windows.

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The House of the Dead: Reawakened features a themed facade around the game cabinet which has been designed as a Gothic manor with creepy doors and shuttered windows. The front door is an 85-inch display, while the two windows are 43-inch displays. These are said to offer jump scares and to reveal the VR play area.

Once inside, players will use commercial VR headsets and weapon controllers capable of haptic recoil (remember Time Crisis?) to blast their way through three missions. The game can be played by up to two players, with each player having their own 2.1 channel audio system.

The House of the Dead: Reawakened follows in the footsteps of the original The House of the Dead, which was first released in arcades in 1997 and then ported to Sega’s then-current home console, Sega Saturn, in 1998.

Numerous mainline releases have followed in arcades, with standalone games and ports appearing on a wide range of home game consoles since. The series has also enjoyed several spin-offs, and at least one (fairly terrible) movie. A new film is currently being developed.

The House of the Dead, The English of the Dead, and The Typing of the Dead are previous entries in the long-running series.

The most recent all-new release in the series was 2018’s arcade shooter The House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn, which was a more traditional arcade shooter that did not feature VR tech.

The House of the Dead: Reawakened will be shown at IAAPA Expo, one of the world’s largest arcade, attractions, and amusement park trade shows. IAAPA Expo is being held in Orlando, Florida from November 17-20.

We’ll have more coverage as The House of the Dead: Reawakened rises from its grave. (Let us know if you caught that extremely old Sega reference in the comments.)

Clearing Out Linux’s Old 32-bit ARM Platform Code Is Itself A Challenge

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Longtime ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann over the past year has been working to clear out a number of old ARM platforms from the mainline kernel tree. With Linux 7.3 many older 32-bit ARM platforms were deprecated and in turn hundreds of kernel drivers orphaned. Now it’s on to removing that actual code, which given the amount of entangled code, is itself a challenge…

Intel Optimization Zone 1.2 Released With New Guides & Recommendations

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Earlier this year Intel announced the “Optimization Zone” as their new initiative to provide a centralized place to collect all their resources for maximizing performance and software tuning on Intel hardware platforms. They’ve continued building out more resources for the Intel Optimization Zone and yesterday released v1.2 with more tuning guides and best practices for optimal performance on Intel hardware…

Valve’s Work On Foveated Rendering For The Open-Source Turnip Driver On The Steam Frame

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As part of Valve’s work on developing the Steam Frame VR headset, they worked on foveated rendering support for the Mesa Turnip driver that supports the Qualcomm Adreno graphics with open-source Vulkan API support. Foveated rendering is the technique to more closely mimic human vision by rendering high detail at your direct gaze point and lower quality in the peripheral vision. For computer graphics, foveated rendering for headsets can be beneficial for conserving power in areas of the render frame that are less important to provide more performance with your main area of focus…

Samsung FCC Approval Signals Gentle Monster & Warby Parker Smart Glasses Nearing Release

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Samsung’s long-awaited smart glasses have cleared FCC testing, suggesting their release is right around the corner.

The News

Two distinct SM-O200P and SM-O200J have appeared in FCC filings, which is typically one of the last steps before commercialization.

Those two product codes indicate Warby Parker and Gentle Monster frames, respectively, as they’ve been seen on pre-production models viewed by Android Police and others.

Warby Parker Smart Glasses | Courtesy Android Police

It appears multiple frame styles from both the US-based Warby Parker and South Korea’s Gentle Monster will use those specific product codes, including three frame variations from Warby Parker, and two (so far) from Gentle Monster.

Built in collaboration with Samsung and Google, the forthcoming fleet of smart glasses are set to be the first to run Google’s Android XR operating system.

Much like Meta’s range of smart glasses, the Warby Parker and Gentle Monster frames will include onboard cameras, microphones and off-ear speakers for doing things like taking calls, listening to podcasts, and interacting with Google Gemini.

While an official spec sheet isn’t available yet, Samsung’s fleet of smart glasses are said to feature a Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset, a single 12MP front-facing camera with indicator LED, and up to 9 hours of use per charge, with a portable charging case providing extra charge.

No pricing or launch date has been announce yet outside of the Fall 2026 release window.

My Take

Samsung is looking to take on Meta’s exponentially growing slate of smart glasses, which thus far not only includes Ray-Ban, Oakley, and Meta-branded camera-clad smart glasses, Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, but also now audio-only smart glasses that omit the camera entirely.

Meta’s multi-year lead over most of the competition will be difficult to shake, so it will be interesting to see whether Samsung’s smart glasses can go beyond simply being the ‘not-Meta’ choice and offer anything meaningfully different.

As a consequence, this will also soon open Samsung to the same public scrutiny that Meta has experienced over the past year, which thus far includes a number of US states and cities taking action to ban the devices from public government buildings. How Samsung (Warby Parker, Gentle Monster and co) handle that will be interesting to watch.

Notably, Meta shipped a mandatory update to Meta Glasses in July that introduces a hardware check when the capture LED has been physically removed or damaged, effectively closing a loophole that let users drill out the privacy light to keep recording while hiding the recording indicator.

Maybe it’s too little, too late for the whole camera-clad smart glasses category? Maybe the whole ‘creeper glasses’ phenomenon is a little overblown? Whatever the case, we’re sure to learn more as Samsung enters the market soon, as the company no doubt hopes to attract a whole new set of fashion-conscious, tech-forward users.

The post Samsung FCC Approval Signals Gentle Monster & Warby Parker Smart Glasses Nearing Release appeared first on Road to VR.