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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: 0.225s | 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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lelandfe ◴[13 Mar 25 00:05 UTC] No.43349042[source]▶
> The videos aren’t always historically accurate to the last detail

Are they ever?

> 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

Like the one of the age of castles man loading an American civil war cannon by holding another cannon up to it: https://www.eggnog.ai/timeportal/37e02fea-bbb2-4b88-ae8c-0a3...

I must have missed that folklore.

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tdb7893 ◴[13 Mar 25 04:23 UTC] No.43350373[source]▶
The inaccuracy was disappointing to me. If the point is historical trivia it's hard when the historical trivia isn't right. I have done some fencing and I noticed it especially for weapons and armor (though that might be just because that's what I know at least a tiny bit about).

Overall it's a fun idea though. I was able to consistently get pretty close in time and location so even with the anachronisms there was enough there.

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1. dkarl ◴[13 Mar 25 15:46 UTC] No.43354463[source]▶
It's a really fun idea and a terrible example of applying AI to a problem. An average person with an internet connection is going to do a terrible job of getting historical details right, and the only thing AI is doing better here is generating artistic depictions of the mistakes faster than a human could.

This is an example of something that looks like an educational game but has the opposite effect. I had fun doing my round, but I won't do it again, because I think I will learn more wrong things from it than right things.