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Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed

(www.eggnog.ai)
497 points samplank2 | 2 comments | 12 Mar 25 20:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.422s | source

Hi HN! I love imagining the past, so I made Time Portal, a game where you are dropped into a historical event and see AI video footage from that moment. You have to guess where you are in time and on the map. It’s like GeoGuessr (and heavily inspired by it!) but for historical events.

The videos are all created with AI. It’s a pipeline of Flux (images), Kling (video), and mmaudio (audio). The videos aren’t always historically accurate to the last detail. They might incorporate elements of folklore or have details from popular beliefs about the way things looked rather than the latest academic research on how they looked.

I’m thinking a lot about how to make the game more interactive. One thing that makes Geoguessr so fun for me is that you can move infinitely and always find more details to help you pinpoint the location. I want Time Portal to have a similar quality. I have a few ideas to try soon that will hopefully make the game more interactive and infinite.

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cdjk ◴[12 Mar 25 21:49 UTC] No.43348004[source]▶
This is awesome. I had the same feeling I had when I first played GeoGuessr. It's one of the first times I've seen what is obviously AI-generated video used in a super compelling way. I want to keep playing.

A few super nitpicky comments:

- I dropped my pin for "Seward's Folly" on Alaska. The videos were clear enough that I knew that's what it was, which made me excited. But then it said it happened in Washington, DC.

- It might be sample bias, but I've only gotten events after year 0 (and technically, it went from 1 BCE/BC to 1 CE/AD.

I'd love to play with this my seven year old, but some of the images are too violent. A "PG mode" would be awesome.

replies(2): >>43348367 #>>43350781 #
1. reaperman ◴[13 Mar 25 06:19 UTC] No.43350781[source]▶
The Seward's Folly had an additional issue besides the fact that some of the locations were in DC and others were in Alaska:

The video of the signing in the White House shows Rutherford B. Hayes, not Andrew Johnson. Andrew Johnson was president in 1867, not Rutherford B. Hayes.

Your location estimate was off because you matched the 3-out-of-4 of videos showing Alaska / Russian Army / Tligits.

My time estimate was off because I matched the only video from the White House ...which was showing Rutherford B. Hayes in office.

replies(1): >>43356035 #
2. maratc ◴[13 Mar 25 18:31 UTC] No.43356035[source]▶
The internal struggle of this project is that it's most likely to attract people interested in history, and these are exactly the people who are most likely to spot inconsistencies and dislike the experience.

Having said that, it's a first occurrence when I see AI-generated videos that provide something of a value.