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497 points samplank2 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.632s | 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.

1. PeterCorless ◴[] No.43355638[source]
The picture was clearly based on El Castillo [Temple of Kukulcán, in Chichén Itzá], which is on the Yucatan Peninsula. Note the chamber on top.

It looks nothing like the Aztec Pyramid of Teotihuacan, which is flat on top and has no structure.

In other words, this is AI slop that makes something that looks plausible, and is utterly misleading.

As someone who has spent decades of my life on history, this makes me weep for humanity.

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2. wswope ◴[] No.43355890[source]
TIL the Nika riots took place in the Roman colosseum, and the blues and greens cheered as lone individuals from each deme were sent down for slaughter. Yeah, this is hot garbage in terms of accuracy.

@Samplank2 - this may hurt to hear, but your assertions that better models and pipeline improvements will solve this are pure cope. What you really need to do here is manually curate and tune the prompts, then cherry-pick with a fine eye for detail. There’s no substitute for actual effort and knowledge, but you seem disinterested in that part.

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3. PeterCorless ◴[] No.43357762[source]
It's very cool, so long as you don't care it's eye-wateringly wrong.