At this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a short film was revealed to the world showing the power of the Unreal Engine and the future of gaming. 

This new video, titled "Rebirth" shows a photorealistic world created using real-world scans from Quixel's Megascans collection. These Megascans include thousands of high-quality assets and visuals for game developers to use in their future creations. 

In this example showing off the potential power of Unreal, the company used over 1,000 scans from its Icelandic Megascans collection to create a real-time cinematic with breathtaking views of an imaginary futuristic world. 

This world includes craggy rocks, jagged hills, rolling fog and a futuristic vehicle travelling along a long road to a large and imposing structure. 

The result is a staggering demonstration of the possibilities and the potential future of video games. Incredibly, this short video was also created by just three talented Quixel artists. 

Epic Games shared more details in a recent post:

"With UE 4.21 at the heart of the real-time pipeline, Quixel's artists were able to iterate on the go, eliminating the need for previsualization or post-production. The team also built a physical camera rig that was able to capture movements in-engine using virtual reality, adding an enhanced dimension of realism to the short. All post-processing and color grading was completed directly within Unreal."

The company hopes that everyone will be able to create content like this in the near future:

"Our goal at Quixel is to democratize high-end 3D assets so that everyone can create captivating photorealistic content and experiences. With advancements in real-time rendering technology powered by Unreal, we set out to see if we could leverage Unreal and Megascans to create a cinematic with inherent photorealism in real-time, rivalling the results from traditional offline rendering," said Teddy Bergsman, CEO, Quixel.

The future of gaming is certainly going to be magnificent if these visuals are anything to go by.