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

(www.eggnog.ai)
497 points samplank2 | 1 comments | 12 Mar 25 20:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.204s | 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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baud147258 ◴[12 Mar 25 22:43 UTC] No.43348479[source]▶
Personnaly I didn't felt as if I was trying to recognize a place and period in history, but trying to guess what prompts were used to generate the pictures. Or at least for some of the pictures where I wasn't as sure of the event (like seeing the rose on a picture for the war of the roses).

Also I didn't listen to many of the sounds, but I got English voices for something happening in France (the Fauvisme guess).

But still I had some fun and it's nice to see a good use for AI

replies(2): >>43348669 #>>43353669 #
1. rob74 ◴[13 Mar 25 14:22 UTC] No.43353669[source]▶
Yeah, it's probably a good strategy to ignore the (unfortunately mostly incorrect) details and rather try to get a general feeling of what the videos are trying to tell you. For example the "shipyard" page - I was first completely puzzled by the very American-looking workers, but then I thought about what important historic event happened in a shipyard, and together with the red-and-white flags (although the most prominent one seems to be Austrian, which is misleading) I arrived at the correct answer...

However, I also have a "complaint": the "balloon" page (trying to avoid spoiling it) has three videos in a big city and one in the countryside, yet the correct location is the countryside location, not the city (although the city is even mentioned by name in one of the prompts!). So a little more care here is probably warranted...

Aaaand the "pope" page has (according to the prompts) three scenes set at the Vatican, but the location seems to be somewhere else in Rome :)