For years, the 3D software development tool Unreal Engine has powered some of the biggest video games on the market--from Fortnite to Valorant--as well as television shows like The Mandalorian and even Porsche engineering. On Tuesday, Epic Games showed off the public release of Unreal Engine 5, the engine's first major update in 8 years. The company promises that the new updates to Unreal Engine 5 will make it the bedrock for the next generation of Web 3 developments--from metaverse experiences to movies, and of course, video games. Unreal Engine is the second-most widely used video game engine, trailing only Unity, and is known for its depth of features and visual quality. Its release opens the door for Disney to create a live Mandalorian video game that looks nearly as real as the show does, for example, says Kim Libreri, the CTO at Epic Games.

For the new sequel, "The Matrix Resurrections," filmmakers deployed much-higher-caliber technologies, including three-dimensional imagery made using artificial intelligence. But after 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. "We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise" in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three "Matrix" films; now he is making things for the metaverse. This year the movies presented us with a car slingshotting from cliff to cliff ("F9"); Ryan Reynolds running amok inside a videogame ("Free Guy"); and giant monsters crushing the Hong Kong skyline ("Godzilla vs. Kong").

Kim Libreri, an award-winning visual effects artist based in Northern California, has worked on movies including Artificial Intelligence and War of the Planet of the Apes. For nine years he has been working with a piece of technology better known for computer games, in particular the smash-hit Fortnite. The Unreal Engine, owned by Epic Games, provides the building blocks and tools that a computer game developer needs, but is increasingly an attractive technology for TV and film producers. The latest version of technology, Unreal Engine 5, is coming out next year, and Epic has been heavily trailing its features. It should allow visual effects artists like Mr Libreri to slot graphics and images straight into a scene, with little fuss.