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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: 0.212s | 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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skort ◴[12 Mar 25 23:57 UTC] No.43348977[source]▶
Interesting concept, but the use of AI art is personally extremely off-putting.

Maybe it works for people who like having everything filtered through a modern cinematic cgi filter. In this case, sure, it is a neat tool for seeing how a hollywood studio might have imagined events of the past to look like. At least you admit upfront here that they are "fantastical imaginations" of historical events, but maybe you should clarify that on the website too.

I've always found it better to hear from actual historians, or better yet, dive into the source material when learning about events of the past. This takes some actual work and requires doing good research. It would be nice if AI could help those folks do their jobs more easily instead of being used to generate more fake looking slop.

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1. serp002 ◴[14 Mar 25 04:02 UTC] No.43359478[source]▶
Of course its better to hear from actual historians/look into it yourself, but this is a super cool way to at least learn a little bit about history while also being a fun game.

If people dont want to spend time deep-diving history but are still interested I think this is an absolutely awesome way to start/learn. I would just suggest adding more ways to learn about the event itself with links to source material/wikipedia etc.