I haven’t followed the demo scene in a long time but saw that the annual Assembly conference recently took place where many new demos are presented. What’s a “demo”? Typically it’s a non-interactive piece of software that displays something beautiful and/or technically impressive. The important thing to remember is that everything is running in real-time, like games do. Demos are not Pixar-like movies that are entirely pre-rendered ahead of time. You could run an executable file on your own PC to produce the same results, assuming it has hardware powerful enough.
Check out the winner, Frameranger, below. You can download the demo itself at the previous link if you’d prefer to run it on your Windows PC instead of watching it in video form. If your PC is powerful enough this is definitely recommended.
The demo is not perfect – the robot fighting animation in particular is a bit cheesy - but overall the aesthetic is very well done. Enjoy.