The Verge: “Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss on making The Matrix Awakens with Epic Games”

A big reason for doing the demo is to demonstrate how Epic thinks its technology can be used to blend scripted storytelling with games and much more, according to Epic CTO Kim Libreri, who worked on the special effects for the original Matrix trilogy. We really believe strongly in big, massive open worlds not just for games, he tells The Verge. You want to be able to navigate massive, huge spaces just like you can in our world. So we’ve made that a lot easier to do in the engine.

The main sandbox experience in The Matrix Awakens isn’t a game as much as it’s a tech demo that Epic plans to release for developers to build on and replicate. Everything in the virtual city is fully loaded no matter where your character is located (rather than rendered only when the character gets near), down to the detail of a chain link fence in an alley. All of the moving vehicles, people, and lighting in the city are generated by AI, the latter of which Libreri describes as a breakthrough that means lighting is no longer “this sort of niche art form”.

Alex Heath, Vjeran Pavic & Phil Esposito

Judging from the demo video, the rendering does look impressive. The cityscapes, buildings, highways, cars, and so on, looked indistinguishable from real-world footage to me – at least at that resolution. People’s movements and faces still have a noticeable artificial quality though – perhaps a reflection of our human perception, which is more sensitive to minute changes in facial expressions.

Created by members of the original movie team including Lana Wachowski, the demo morphs from breathtakingly realistic cinematic to fast-paced third-person shooter experience, complete with an action-packed car chase sequence, and also provides a rich, vastly detailed open world to explore

Nevertheless, the technology raises awkwardly difficult issues for the movie industry and the broader society, as mentioned when I wrote about the AI recreation of Beethoven’s 10th symphony. If an actor’s face and body language can be digitally rendered based on their past performances, movie studios could continue using the same famous actors for decades, after they aged or even died. This would reduce the opportunities for young actors to ‘breakthrough’ in this industry, and lead to a greater concentration of wealth and influence for the established players, either actors or the studios, depending on who retains the rights to a particular persona.

We sat down with the two stars of the demo and the Matrix movies, Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Ann Moss, to talk about how technology is blurring the line between what’s real and virtual, what to expect from the new Matrix Resurrections movie, and a lot more

Actors could also star in multiple projects simultaneously because their digital avatar would not need to be physically present at the location to act – another avenue for concentration. It reduces the need for supporting cast as well, as with this technology you could potentially scan a random person (or simply tap into facial recognition databases around the world) and animate their body and face according to a scenario, without the person having any acting experience. The creative potential is great, but so is the potential for abuse and inequality.