AMD To Buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs For $8.2B In Big Spatial AI Power Play

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AMD To Buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs For $8.2B In Big Spatial AI Power Play
AMD is making one of its biggest strategic moves yet to challenge NVIDIA’s dominance in the artificial intelligence landscape. In an all-stock deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion, AMD announced a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, an AI startup founded by renowned Stanford professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who is also known as the “Godmother

Mesa 26.3 Enables Intel’s New Jay Shader Compiler By Default, Compile Times 55% Faster Or 66% Faster Than Windows

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Over the past year Jay has been in development as a new open-source shader compiler for Intel GPUs. Alyssa Rosenzweig has been leading its development since joining Intel in 2025. For Mesa 26.3 the Jay shader compiler is being enabled by default for modern Intel graphics hardware and is around ~10% faster than the existing BRW compiler code…

This 65-Inch Sony OLED TV Is $800 Off During the October Prime Day Sale

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We may earn a commission from links on this page. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.

Prime Day 2026 ends tonight, and Lifehacker is sharing the best sales based on product reviews, comparisons, and price-tracking tools before it’s over. 

OLED TVs are a hot (yet pricey) item on many shoppers’ wishlists, and many wait to add to cart until the next sale season arrives. Now that early October Prime Day deals are in full force, a few OLEDs from premium brands are seeing discounts, including the Sony 65 Inch Bravia 8 II, which is 24% off during Amazon’s “Big Deal Days” sale, according to price-tracking tools. 

The Bravia 8 II earned an “Excellent” rating from PCMag for its gorgeous picture quality and a central channel input that allows you to incorporate the TV into a surround sound setup by using its built-in speakers for the center channel while leaving the other channels to your satellites. It’s also one of the only high-end OLEDs that uses Google TV as its smart TV platform and supports Google Assistant.

The Wi-Fi 6E-equipped set is “satisfyingly bright” according to PCMag, though it doesn’t get quite as bright as competitors like the Hisense U8QG or the Samsung QN90F. If this means it’s not the best for daytime viewing (though it does have an anti-glare layer), the Bravia 8 II makes up for it with deep blacks, elite motion handling, dazzling colors, and best-in-class image processing. It also has a 120Hz refresh rate with VRR and an input lag of 16.1 milliseconds, which makes it a decent choice for gaming as well as sports, movies, and TV.

If you’re looking for an OLED with striking picture quality, a bright, colorful panel, and Google TV, the Sony 65 Inch Bravia 8 II is an excellent option—and now that it’s $800 off, it’s a smart time to buy. 

October Prime Day FAQs

Is Prime Day once a year?

Prime Day happens every summer. Prime Big Deal Days (or October Prime Day) happens every October. Big Spring Sale happens every spring.

How do you prepare for Prime Day?

You can read our prep guide to be ready for the big sale. One thing you can start doing is setting price alerts for products you want so you can be notified when they go on sale.

Is Amazon Prime Day worth it?

Yes, we’ve done the math, and it’s worth it for most people.

Looking for something else? Retailers like Walmart and Best Buy have Prime Day competition sales that are especially useful if you don’t have Amazon Prime.

  • Walmart’s Prime Day competition sale runs through Sunday, July 13 and includes deals up to 50% off. It’s an especially good option if you have Walmart+. 

  • Best Buy’s Prime Day competition sale, “Black Friday in July,” runs through Sunday, July 13 and has some of the best tech sales online. It’s an especially good option if you’re a My Best Buy “Plus” or “Total” member.

Our Best Editor-Vetted Early Prime Day Deals Right Now

Deals are selected by our commerce team

Meta VR Glasses, Quest 3 & Steam Frame Compared – Specs & Features

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2026 is another big year in VR hardware, but which headset should you consider buying? The old reliable Quest 3? Valve’s Steam Frame? Or maybe you should wait for Meta VR Glasses? Read on to see the specs—and probably more importantly—their use cases compared.

Skip to the conclusion, please.

Here’s the quick and dirty conclusion you can learn more about in the breakdown below:

  • Steam Frame is for power-users and tinkerers. Despite having Steam at your fingertips, game support is still an ongoing factor.
  • Quest 3 is for budget-conscious users who value ease of use and a massive game catalogue.
  • VR Glasses are for productivity-minded users who want private monitors, personal theaters for flatscreen and stereoscopic content, as well as access to regular Quest games.

Steam Frame – Starting at $1,059

Steam Frame is Valve’s second-ever VR headset, one that’s a radically different product from the first, Valve Index.

It’s also one of the first VR headsets we can confidently say combines strong standalone capabilities with an easy-to-use PC streaming experience out of the box. And Valve is leaning pretty hard into its use as a PC streaming headset, which is probably for good reason.

Road to VR

In standalone mode, demanding or poorly optimized games can be basically unplayable, with Valve’s ‘Frame-certified’ program helping consumers to figure out which games actually work well on Frame, both VR and flatscreen games. Critically, Valve didn’t make any big budget games for Frame, although Half-Life: Alyx (2020) did get a standalone mode.

Still, the headset isn’t stopping you from trying anything, which is such a breath of fresh air in comparison to the competition, which largely feature locked-down bootloaders. It’s extremely capable and expandable, but less easy to use than its more console-like competitors, making Steam Frame a great choice for power-users and those willing to tinker with settings to find the optimal experience. As a mixed reality device though, it’s lacking a color passthrough camera, which is a bit of a bummer in 2026 – although you can tack on this upgrade from Arcturus.

As you’d imagine, there’s also a large overlap in base gaming functionality, which could make it hard to justify Frame’s $460 premium ($1,060 total) over Quest 3’s $600 price point. Read our deep dive review of Steam Frame to learn more.

Meta Quest 3 – $600

When Quest 3 was released in October 2023, it wasn’t exactly supposed to be the cheap and cheerful option among the milieu of standalone and PC VR headsets, but rather a cheaper piece of hardware that importantly capitalized on Quest Pro’s failures as a mixed reality platform.

Courtesy Meta

With it, came bigger and more graphically intensive games (and mixed reality modes galore) including Asgard’s Wrath 2 (2023), Arizona Sunshine 2 (2023), and graphical upgrades to favorites such as The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners (2020) and Red Matter 2 (2022). It also signaled a new push by Meta to turn its then flagship VR gaming console into more of a general computing device, largely driven by the entrance of Apple Vision Pro in February 2024.

Still, Quest 3 is a VR gaming headset through and through, which benefits from a massive back catalogue of new and previous Quest titles. It’s also less bulky than its predecessor, Quest 3S, which co-opts Quest 2’s old Fresnel lenses and displays for a cheaper (and visually worse) experience than Quest 3.

Notably, Meta hasn’t said when it will release a Quest 4, so there’s no telling how long Quest 3 will be the target platform for developers creating games to run on Horizon OS, although for a minority of Quest 3 owners, the next step could be VR Glasses…

Meta VR Glasses – $1,300

Meta officially unveiled VR Glasses at Connect 2026 in late September, making for its next big flagship VR device. This time though, the company isn’t really pushing gaming as its big use case when VR Glasses arrive sometime in Spring 2027, but rather productivity and casual content consumption.

Courtesy Meta

Still, it shares Quest’s operating system, Horizon OS, which means it can play the same games and content as Quest 3/3S, albeit at a less immersive 70-degree horizontal field of view (FOV) than Quest 3’s ~110-degree horizontal FOV. It also supports Quest Touch Plus controllers, although its major focus is on hand and eye-tracking, as it doesn’t come with any sort of controller in the box.

And while Meta is trumpeting a lot of the productivity-focused stuff originally released on Quest 3, as the headset features some very compelling passthrough mixed reality, the biggest upgrade is undoubtedly the new form factor. It’s only ~100g of on-head weight, as it offloads both battery and compute to a ~300g pocketable puck tethered to the headset via an optical cable, which terminates in a proprietary port.

So it’s not exactly the upgrade pathway for dyed in the wool Quest fans, as it sacrifices visual immersion for better ergonomics. Now, is that worth the $700 premium over Quest 3? Meta is hoping so. Check out our hands-on with VR Glasses to learn more.

VR Glasses vs. Quest 3 vs. Steam Frame Specs

Spec Meta VR Glasses Quest 3 Steam Frame
Retail Price $1,299 $599 (512 GB) $1,059 (256 GB)
$1,299 (1 TB)
Launch / availability Spring 2027 Oct. 2023 September 2026
Weight ~100g glasses + ~300g compute puck 515g 435g
Chipset Snapdragon XR2 Gen 3 Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 Snapdragon Series 8 Gen 3
RAM 12 GB 8 GB Unified LPDDR5 RAM 16 GB Unified LPDDR5 RAM
Operating System Horizon OS Horizon OS SteamOS
Wi-Fi Wi-Fi 7 WiFi 6E Wi-Fi 7, 2×2 – Dual 5Ghz/6Ghz
Storage 128 GB 512 GB 256 GB / 1 TB
Expanded Storage microSD card slot up to 1 TB N/A microSD card slot up to 2 TB
Optics Pancake Pancake Pancake
Display Micro-OLED LCD LCD
Per-eye Resolution 2,412 × 2,288 2,064 × 2,208 2,160 × 2,160
Refresh rate Up to 120 Hz Up to 120 Hz 72–144 Hz
FOV 70° H × 66° V 110° H × 96° V Up to 110°
Pixels Per Degree (PPD) ~37 ~25 ~20-25
Eye tracking Yes No Yes
Hand tracking Yes Yes No
Passthrough Color Color Monochrome
Motion controllers Touch Plus supported Touch Plus included Steam Frame Controllers
PC VR Wired & wireless Wired & wireless Wired & wireless
Battery ~35 Wh, external puck 19.44 Wh, internal 21.6 Wh, rear-mounted
Port USB-C charging and data, proprietary optical lead to puck USB-C USB-C
Audio Dual speaker drivers integrated into headstrap Dual speaker drivers integrated into headstrap Dual speaker drivers integrated into headstrap
Mic ? 1 microphone Dual microphone array

The post Meta VR Glasses, Quest 3 & Steam Frame Compared – Specs & Features appeared first on Road to VR.

El Nino Bursts Through Temperature Record Months Before Peak

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The current El Nino has already surpassed the highest Pacific temperature anomaly recorded in the modern era, reaching 3.05C above the 1991-2020 average months before its expected peak. The commonly used ONI measure is also on the verge of breaking the 2015 record. Forecasts cited by The Guardian suggest the event could reach about 4.0C later this year. From the report: The latest data shows the temperature rise at the heart of El Nino in the Pacific Ocean has now reached 3.05C. That is higher than the 3.02C set in late November 2015, the previous high set in the 150 years of modern records. This temperature is measured against the average of 1991-2020. The preferred measure of most meteorologists uses a 30-year rolling average as a reference and so takes account of human-caused global heating. This metric, called ONI (Nino3.4), is on the brink of breaking the record, just one-hundredth of a degree below the 2015 record. Both metrics are underpinned by data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The most recent forecasts predict a peak of 4.0C in November and December, according to the average of 14 different models assessed by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. That is a level so far above previous events that Hausfather called it “mind-blowing,” while others have described it as “Godzilla-level.” Any temperature rise above 0.5C is deemed an El Nino; above 2C is officially called a “very strong” El Nino — often referred to as a “super” El Nino. The current El Nino is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere in which temperatures are already rising rapidly due to human-caused global heating. This double whammy means 2027 is expected to “blow apart” previous records and become the hottest year ever recorded.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.