First look: Valve has open-sourced Lepton, the Android compatibility layer built for the Steam Frame headset, giving VR developers a way to bring existing Android games to the device without rebuilding them for an entirely different platform. The newly available code also offers a detailed look at how Valve tailors an Android environment for VR gaming on SteamOS, covering everything from graphics access to development and profiling tools.

The code is now available through Valve’s GitLab repository.

The release follows the Steam Frame’s launch and builds on Valve’s March announcement of Lepton alongside the Steam Frame Verified certification requirements.

In purpose, the project resembles Proton, Valve’s tool for running Windows games on SteamOS and Linux, though it takes a different technical route: rather than translating Windows software interfaces, Lepton provides a purpose-built, game-tuned Android environment.

Valve has kept that environment deliberately narrow. Lepton isn’t designed to turn Steam Frame into a general-purpose Android device, nor does it aim to support every Android app. To keep overhead low, the software disables Android services that aren’t needed for gaming – a trade-off that can affect apps relying on those services.

Lepton is built to work closely with the SteamOS host system, mounting host libraries for graphics drivers, Steam and Steamworks, and Vulkan layers. Valve lists support for graphics stacks including Mesa and Zink, along with Vulkan tooling for foveated rendering and render-pass optimization.

Those capabilities are crucial for VR games, where rendering efficiency and stable frame delivery are central to comfort and image quality. By exposing the host graphics stack to the Android environment, Valve appears to be avoiding some of the overhead that can come with a more isolated container approach.

The project also ships with tools aimed at developers porting games to the platform, including support for debuggers such as strace, GDB, LLDB and RenderDoc, plus Perfetto for performance profiling. The flatscreen application window stays hidden by default, though developers can surface it for testing and troubleshooting.

Valve says Lepton runs without root access or root-level setup tools, with every process inside a Lepton instance running as the same non-root user. Per the project’s documentation, there’s no enforced isolation between apps within an instance, so each app is expected to run in its own separate Android container.

For developers, the open-sourced code offers a clear window into Valve’s approach to Android game support on SteamOS, including its use of host graphics libraries, Vulkan layers and a reduced Android software stack. It also gives Linux developers a base for experimenting with other uses, though Valve cautioned that those are outside Lepton’s main purpose.

The initiative aims to ‘position Ireland as a leading testbed for insurance innovation by connecting emerging companies directly with insurers, industry experts, investors and experienced founders’.

12 Ireland-based insurance technology start-ups will participate in the second edition of InsTech.ie’s Foundry, a pre-accelerator programme run in partnership with Furthr, one of the country’s four Business Innovation Centres.

InsTech.ie is a national body that aims to connect start-ups, insurers, investors and policymakers to accelerate innovation and help Irish insurtech companies scale globally.

It is supported by 24 insurance industry members, tracks more than 120 Irish insurtech companies, and has eight innovation partnerships, including with IDA Ireland, KPMG and Enterprise Ireland.

The Foundry initiative is designed to create a direct route between established insurance expertise and younger or smaller companies developing technologies capable of shaping the insurance sector’s future, according to InsTech.ie.

The programme aims to “position Ireland as a leading testbed for insurance innovation by connecting emerging companies directly with insurers, industry experts, investors and experienced founders”, according to its operator.

“The first Foundry cohort showed what can happen when ambitious founders are given direct access to the insurance expertise, networks and decision-makers that can help turn promising ideas into commercially viable businesses,” said Gary Leyden, CEO of InsTech.ie.

“With cohort two, we want to build on that momentum and give another group of companies the opportunity to validate their solutions, develop meaningful industry relationships and accelerate their path to market.

“Ireland has a unique combination of insurance expertise and technology talent, and the Foundry is about bringing those two strengths together.”

The 12 selected companies, and their technological offerings, are:

Alteric AI

An AI orchestration layer for commercial brokerages to automate workflows across servicing, renewals, claims and new business.

Fairwrite

A start-up aiming to make life and protection insurance more inclusive for people with mental health conditions, disabilities or neurodivergence through a more individualised approach to underwriting.

Finch AI Systems/LitAgent

An explainable AI platform to support personal-injury reserving and settlement valuation, producing consistent, traceable assessments while keeping the final decision with the claims professional.

Global Nutrition Value

This company is creating a time-stamped evidence trail for food safety and compliance data with applications across underwriting, loss prevention, claims and product recalls.

Insurteam MGA

A start-up creating a solution that combines embedded travel insurance distribution with AI-enabled claims handling, allowing partners to offer cover at checkout and customers to manage claims through WhatsApp.

Maximo

A platform connecting pensions, tax and open banking to help consumers better understand and increase their pension contributions and access associated tax relief.

Model Library/Elliptic

This start-up is developing a climate-risk modelling platform to help insurers and other risk-transfer providers understand and quantify basis risk in parametric insurance.

RMI Agentic

A solution designed for managing risks created when autonomous AI agents transact on behalf of consumers.

SeatFair Technologies

This start-up is exploring how preference-pricing and optimisation technology could support complex reinsurance placements involving price, capacity, counterparties and terms.

TalkTerms AI/Swift Settle

An AI decision-support platform designed to help insurance professionals manage complex claims and complaints while retaining human oversight.

Vardus

A pre-send compliance platform that checks customer communications, identifies potential regulatory issues and provides greater oversight of recurring compliance risks.

Voxalytics

This start-up’s solution analyses broker-client calls to automate administration and identify portfolio-level signals around customer retention, churn, cross-sell and growth.

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Tonight’s UFC 331 headline bout is a classic case of revenge or repeat as Joshua Van puts the UFC flyweight title he won against Alexandre Pantoja on the line at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The Fearless won the belt in controversial fashion in December 2025 and the Cannibal is determined to right the wrong he has felt ever since.

Van’s victory at UFC 323 came after Pantjoa suffered a dislocated elbow 26 seconds into the original fight when the former fell and landed on the latter. The Brazilian has felt ignored by Dana White ever since, despite having championship victories against Brandon Moreno, Brandon Royval, Steve Erceg, Kai Asakura, and Kai Kara-France on his resumé. The 36-year-old has the experience and fuel from that defeat to inspire him. He’ll become the third flyweight champion to regain the belt after Moreno and Deiveson Figueiredo if he wins.

Andrew Bosworth used an AMA on his personal Instagram to argue that the conversation about Meta’s glasses should not be shaped by a relatively small number of bad actors. Katie Notopoulos reported the exchange for Business Insider.

Most people use the glasses normally, he said, much as they would a phone camera, only more convenient and more hands-free. He pointed to the indicator light and the anti-tampering measures that stop recording when it is covered.

The first defence is probably true and does not answer the question

Almost certainly most wearers are doing nothing objectionable. That is true of most technologies and it has never been the test for a device carried through public space.

The phone comparison is where the argument gives itself away. A raised phone is a visible act that the person opposite can see and respond to, and the entire selling point of the glasses is that recording no longer looks like anything.

More in the moment is the same property as harder to notice. The convenience and the problem are one feature.

The second defence has already failed in public

The recording light is the mechanism Meta has staked its answer on, and it has been closing holes in it all year. A software update stopped a loophole where a wearer could start recording, wait, then cover the light, and it bricked cameras on units where the light had been drilled out.

That enforcement was real and it was not small. Meta described the action as covering fewer than one in a thousand glasses ever sold, which on seven million pairs in a year is a great many devices.

The fix is also already beaten. TNW reported this month that a $2 sticker defeats the feature, which is a poor foundation for a privacy guarantee.

The roadmap is the strongest rebuttal

The Information reported this week that Meta is preparing a camera-free version of the glasses, codenamed Luna, with six microphones and no camera at all. TNW covered the report, which points to an unveiling at Connect on 23 September and shipments in October.

Companies do not remove the defining feature of a product to placate a small number of bad actors. They remove it when the category has a perception problem they cannot moderate their way out of.

Bosworth said at the end of the AMA that there is more to say at Connect. That is five days after he said the discourse had been captured by a fringe.

What Luna would actually change

Taking the camera out addresses the bystander problem directly, and that is a real answer rather than a cosmetic one. It also removes the thing most people buy the glasses for.

Six microphones is not nothing, though. The visual privacy question would be solved and replaced by an audio one, and there is no equivalent of the recording light for a microphone.

Nobody has established a convention for signalling that a face-worn device is listening. Luna would ship into that gap.

Europe is not treating this as discourse

The enforcement is concrete and it is mostly happening on this side of the Atlantic. Paris prosecutors have opened a criminal inquiry into sexual harassment linked to smart glasses used to film women in the street, and the French cybercrime unit has been testing the devices.

Norway is weighing restrictions on camera-equipped wearables. Hamburg’s data protection commissioner has suggested the glasses may already fall foul of German rules on concealed recording equipment.

The regulatory question is also further along than the product one. The LED update arrived alongside French and European data protection scrutiny, and the European Data Protection Board has a report coming on the category.

The moderation record is mixed by its own reporter’s account

Bosworth said harassing content will be removed and accounts taken down where the behaviour is systematic. Business Insider, which examined how the policy was working over the summer, found the moderation uneven.

The targeting has also been narrow. Videos of men harassing women have drawn action, while prank clips tormenting retail workers have been reported as a growing problem.

The competitive read

Meta is not the only company weighing this. Apple is targeting 2027 for its own glasses and has not settled the camera question.

If the market leader ships a camera-free model this autumn, that becomes the reference point for everyone still deciding. The bad actors framing looks weaker every week the roadmap moves the other way.

What to watch

Watch Connect on 23 September. If Luna appears without a camera, the product has conceded what the AMA did not.

Watch what Meta says about the microphones. A camera-free device that listens continuously needs its own indicator, and the company has not proposed one.

Garmin’s toughest smartwatch just got $250 cheaper, and this is the one rated to handle a 40-metre dive like it’s nothing.

Durability like that comes standard on the fenix 8 AMOLED GPS Smartwatch, 47mm, now cut to $749.99, down from its usual $999.99 price tag, a straight saving of $250 on one of Garmin’s most feature-packed watches to date this year.