Norwegian company, The Future Group, a developer of interactive mixed reality (IMR), has announced a licensing agreement with Epic Games to use its Unreal Engine 4 middleware for film-quality 3D rendered scenes on TV broadcasts.

The Future Group has built unique enhancements specific to broadcast TV on top of Unreal Engine, providing the ability to merge people and objects in real-time into virtual worlds.

Having recently emerged for stealth, The Future Group’s new product is Frontier, a 3D visual effects platform being used by FremantleMedia in their upcoming IMR game show for worldwide primetime TV, Lost in Time. Using Frontier powered by Unreal Engine, TV production companies can create live photorealistic effects and virtual sets that are integrated with anything or anyone from the real world to create IMR-enhanced shows, mobile games and more.

“The Future Group is delivering one of the most advanced uses of Unreal Engine in broadcast to date with Lost in Time,” said Kim Libreri, CTO, Epic Games in a statement. “The visual quality is absolutely stunning and we look forward to seeing the Frontier platform open new doors in interactive episodic entertainment.”

“Working with Unreal Engine allows us to use the performance standard-bearer in game engines as the foundation of Frontier,” said Jens Petter Høili, co-founder and Chairman of The Future Group. “Epic has been nothing but supportive of The Future Group in our efforts, and we are very excited to have found that Unreal is capable of amazing real-time Hollywood effects, even in an HD broadcast environment and workflow. We are using Unreal to create blockbuster IMR effects, and enabling it through our broadcast platform Frontier.”

The company was co-founded by Bård Anders Kasin, a Technical Director at Warner Brothers, who was on the team responsible for the visual effects in the The Matrix Trilogy and acclaimed Nordic entrepreneur Jens Petter Høili. With Future Group-developed enhancements, Frontier provides highly-realistic scenery through state-of-the-art features such as particle systems, dynamic textures, live reflections, shadows and collision detection, all at a quality level for broadcast HD resolutions and beyond.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of The Future Group and Epic Games, reporting back with further updates.