What happens when you combine the world’s most powerful game engine with cutting edge console technology? The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is a new tech demo that shows just that.
Created by members of the original The Matrix film team, including Lana Wachowski, James McTeigue, and John Gaeta, in collaboration with teams from Epic Games and partners, this experience provides a glimpse into the possibilities of interactive storytelling and entertainment that Unreal Engine 5 were created to look like in the future.
Neither game nor film, but the combination of elements from both, the demomorphs of a movie with incredibly realistic digital replicas of Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne-Moss to an interactive experience of car chases and fast-paced third-person shooter action.
The driving and shooting sequence is unique every time you perform it. Because the car accidents are simulated in real time with the high-performance physics system of the Unreal Engine chaosso that the same crash never occurs twice.
Borrowing from the way live-action filmmakers explore a city to find the best streets to tell their story, the team explored various creative options for the cinematic content by driving cars through the virtual city to get convincing shots. Because this process took place in the virtual environment, it didn’t have the physical limitations of the real world – for example, it took hours to get from one place to another.
Everything in the demo takes place in a huge open-world city that extends over 16 square kilometers. The sprawling metropolis contains seven million instanced assets, each consisting of millions of polygons, including seven thousand buildings, 45,073 parked cars (38,146 of which are passable), over 260 km of streets, 512 km of sidewalks and thousands of intersections, lamp posts, and shafts.
The demo is able to cope with this geometric complexity thanks to Nanites, the virtualized micro-polygon geometry system from UE5. Nanite is a next generation technology that can process and stream billions of polygons, delivering exceptionally high levels of detail and image fidelity. A powerful audio generation system replicates the sounds of a busy city and enhances the sense of presence in the experience.
The virtual city is impressively photoreal and uses the powerful lighting systems of the Unreal Engine to provide highly realistic lighting and reflections in the interactive parts of the demo and to create beautiful, realistic soft shadows of the characters in the cinematic element.
A city is of course more than bricks and mortar – it is the hustle and bustle in which a multitude of people go about their business. Thousands of digital people and vehicles swarm the city, powered by artificial intelligence systems. Because these actors are part of a global simulation that is constantly being evaluated, they effectively exist whether you look at them or not – which means they act much more believably.
After seeing that impressive demos this developer The coalition The team formed this summer was brought on board to investigate how the Unreal Engine can unlock the full potential of Xbox console hardware.
Your help ensured that the Xbox Series X and Series S experience was at an impressive level of performance and quality – proof that next-generation content can be enjoyed across the range of consoles today which benefits gamers and Unreal Engine developers alike.
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience shows how the next generation of interactive experiences will deliver breathtaking photorealism, incredibly rich and complex open worlds, and increasingly engaging action.
Download the technical demo for Xbox Series X | S to explore the future of interactive storytelling and entertainment today!
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience
Epic Games Inc.
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is a free, groundbreaking, cinematic and interactive open world tech demo that combines the power of the Xbox Series X / S with UE5. An original concept that was written and filmed by Lana Wachowski and James McTeigue. This limitless technical demo shows Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss repeating their roles as Neo and Trinity while simultaneously playing themselves in a mixture of the real and the unreal. Many of the VFX crew from the original film came back together for the digital rendering of the experience, including John Gaeta, Kim Libreri, Jerome Platteaux, George Borshukov and Michael Gay, in collaboration with teams from Epic Games and partners such as SideFX, Evil Eye Pictures, WetaFX (formerly Weta Digital) and many others. The demo transforms from breathtakingly realistic motion picture into a fast-paced third-person shooter experience, complete with action-packed car chases and also features a rich, highly detailed open world to explore in the universe of ‘The Matrix’. Download now to experience the future of interactive storytelling and entertainment with UE5. ”
