Meta wants to make it clear it's not giving up on high-end VR experiences yet. So, in a rare move, the company is spilling the beans on several VR headset prototypes at once. The goal, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is to eventually craft something that could pass the "visual Turing Test," or the point where virtual reality is practically indistinguishable from the real world. That's the Holy Grail for VR enthusiasts, but for Meta's critics, it's another troubling sign that the company wants to own reality (even if Zuckerberg says he doesn't want to completely own the metaverse).

It’s a weird year for video games. We’re 19 months into a fresh console cycle and support for the PS4 and Xbox One is finally tapering off as developers shift focus to the PS5, Xbox Series X and PC cloud gaming platforms. The pandemic slowed or paused development on a generation of games, and studios of all sizes are being absorbed by the biggest names in the room. The industry is in flux and the rest of the year reflects this instability. Put simply, there aren’t a lot of huge games coming out in the second half of 2022.

Meta is opening an Avatars Store where you can purchase outfits for your avatar on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. The new looks include designer duds from Balenciaga, Prada and Thom Browne, and the company expects to add more designers over time. Zuckerberg and Eva Chen, Meta’s VP of fashion partnerships, announced the new store on Instagram Live, calling it the “first live avatar fashion show.” The “fashion show” consisted of Chen holding up paper drawings of Zuckerberg’s avatar wearing increasingly questionable, if metaverse-ready, outfits.

The ViewFinity name promises "pinpoint accuracy and consistency" for designers, artists and professionals, Samsung said. To that end, both models offer 98 percent DCI-P3 color gamut coverage, up to a billion colors (probably using 8-bit + FRC and not true 10-bit panels), Pantone validation for accurate colors, and factory calibration. The 32-inch model is certified to VESA's DisplayHDR 600 category so should be bright enough for some HDR work, while the 27-inch model conforms to the more limited VESA DisplayHDR 400 category. 

Telegram also announced that it became one of the top give downloaded apps worldwide in 2022 and now has 700 million monthly active users. It also unveiled several new features for all users, including verification badges for public figures and organizations, join request for public groups, improved bots, improved chat previews on Android, improved external sharing on iOS and more. The update is rolling out gradually, so if you don't see it now, "the new version will become available soon," Telegram wrote. 

WhatsApp has added a handful of features to make group calls more manageable. As of this week, you can both mute and message specific people in your group calls, the company announced in a tweet spotted by Android Central (via The Verge). The former should be particularly helpful in situations where someone might not be aware that everyone else can hear what’s going on in the background of their home or office. The company has also added a banner that will notify you when someone joins a group call.

Nearly four months after integrating Comixology into its other services, Amazon acknowledged the platform has been left worse off. “We understand that the current experience needs improvements, and want you to know that we’re working hard to get those out the door as quickly as possible,” the company said in an 11-part Twitter thread spotted by Gizmodo.

Two weeks after release, Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal has earned approximately $24 million for the troubled studio, according to Appmagic. In an estimate it shared with GameDev Reports, the analytics firm said the free-to-play game was downloaded almost 8.5 million times over the same timeframe, with 26 percent of downloads originating in the US. The bulk of Blizzard’s revenue from Diablo Immortal has also come from America. To date, US players contributed about 43 percent of all the game’s earnings.

Since the start of the year, Google has tried to publicly pressure Apple into adopting the GSMA’s RCS messaging protocol. The search giant’s campaign has involved everything from not-so-subtle jabs at I/O 2022 to long Twitter threads from the head of Android. Now the feud has expanded to include Drake.

As distressing a prospect it may sound, our world did exist before social media. Those were some interesting times with nary a poorly lit portion of Cheesecake Factory fare to critique, exactly zero epic fails to laugh at and not one adorable paw bean available for ogling. There weren't even daily main characters! We lived as low-bandwidth savages, huddled around the soft glow of CRT monitors and our cackling, crackling signal modulators, blissfully unaware of the societal upheaval this newfangled internet would bring about.