Your games are about become practically indistinguishable from reality. If you don’t believe me, check out these stunning demos of the new Unreal Engine 4.22 and its raytracing capabilities.

(Image credit: Deep Forest Films / Goodbye Kansas Studios)

The demos — presented today at the Game Developers Conference 2019 at the Moscone Center, in San Francisco, California — were rendered using the new photorealistic features of Epic Games’ popular game engine, including some mind-blowing raytracing.

At times (most of the time) they totally cross the uncanny valley — the state defined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in which humans feel uncomfortable looking at things that look realistic but not as realistic as reality itself.

This is particularly true in Rebirth, a short real-time video that show some desolate planet and futuristic structure. If you told me that most of these shots were actually filmed with a real camera on some deserted area, I would believe you.

(Image credit: Epic Games)

The other amazing demo is Troll, part of an animated movie created by Deep Forest Films and Goodbye Kansa Studios. Here, the uncanny valley is crossed on the most challenging category: humans.



We are especially good at detecting when another human is not real but a synthetic creation. Here, the disbelief totally disappears in many of the shots that show a woman playing with fairies.

And like the fairies, paraphrasing one of Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws, real time-CGI is starting to feel indistinguishable from magic.