Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 just keeps setting records. After becoming the best-selling video game in October and having the biggest launch in franchise history, Treyarch's latest entry in the popular FPS franchise adds another notch to its belt: it is the most played game on Xbox.

It's almost a clich to say at this point, but VR is a medium still in its infancy. It's a medium that still hasn't found the inherent level of consistent polish present in traditional AAA games.

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Image: Ford With more cars equipped with partial automation hitting the road, safety researchers are growing increasingly worried about driver attention and the potential for these systems to cause crashes. A new survey has a possible solution to the problem of wandering attention while using partial automation: let drivers adjust the steering. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) conducted a new study that found that drivers were more likely to stay alert while using advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) when they were allowed to correct the steering without disengaging the partial automation. “These results suggest that small differences in system design can nudge drivers toward safer habits,” said IIHS president David Harkey in a... Continue reading…

Image: Humanoid Origin Humanoid Origin, the game studio founded by former BioWare general manager Casey Hudson, is shutting down operations. The closure was announced in a post on the company’s LinkedIn page. “Despite efforts to shield the studio from broader challenges in the industry, an unexpected shortfall of funding left us unable to sustain operations,” the post read. Humanoid Origin was founded by Hudson in 2021 when it was then known as Humanoid Studios. Hudson started the studio after leaving a 20-year career at BioWare where he worked as a producer and director on several of the studio’s seminal titles including Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Hudson left BioWare in 2014 for a brief stint at Microsoft Studios before returning... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Google is testing out media playback straight from Android smartwatches’ built-in speakers in Wear OS 5.1, according to Android developer release notes spotted by Mishaal Rahman. That’s in addition to adding support for credential managers in the coming update, which Google revealed is based on Android 15. (Wear OS 5, which rolled out earlier this month, is based on Android 14.) Watch speaker playback will work for “devices that support media playback through the watch speaker,” Google writes, adding that users can pick the built-in speaker for apps that include the capability. It’s not clear which devices that would mean. Android smartwatches only play media over Bluetooth right now — something that was true of all Apple Watches u... Continue reading…