Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed (eggnog.ai)
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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Edit: dang suggested we should add more about the link to our startup, so here's more if anyone's interested:
Originally, we were making an AI video creator tool with a focus on character consistency in long videos (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39853474). A year ago, character consistency was a big problem and we developed a solution for it in AI videos. Now though, a lot of other AI video creator tools have come out, and 1) character consistency has been solved in other ways 2) the other tools just make better quality videos than ours.
So we decided to pivot from building video creator tools to building apps with AI video as the core format. When I say that we plan to sell apps like Time Portal, it's still pretty open ended. First, we just want to build an app/apps that people really like using for free and figure out the best way to monetize them later. Time Portal is not for sale right now. It's free to play on the web and there is a free app in the App Store.
The Alaska sale is in DC? One of the videos has the exchange of the flags on the post.
On the Guess page it just has a blank screen with the 4 cinematic clips below...
And I’d love to see the idea expanded further. “AI recreations of historical scenes” is an idea with tons of interesting potential.
I guessed it was supposed to be Agincourt because of the prominence of archers.
Excellent idea and can’t wait for the next version.
1. The AI imagery is often misaligned with the actual answer, with some anachronistic elements.
2. The scoring seems harsh. I got a couple of answers within 50km and/or 10 years in the time scale but was still severely penalized.
Good luck with this, I will definitely watch your progress and pass it along
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.
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.
Having said that, it's a first occurrence when I see AI-generated videos that provide something of a value.
I had real trouble with the battle of towton just now - the armour was “off” and someone was wondering around with a really cool white rose icon on their breastplate - and I could not work out if it was trying to be accurate or imaginative (accurate woukd look more like these things https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armorial_of_the_House_of_Pla...)
I mean the fact that there were moving videos of Dutch astronomers or Ethiopian rulers is god damn amazing - it looks luscious
But it also looks … cut-scene. It’s brilliant. But it’s also a work of imagination (LLM imagings).
So it’s quite hard to do the game itself - but it’s amazing to drop people into the context and excite a historical interest.
It would’ve been cool to collect actual images from history. I’m sure there are 1000s of public domain images that could be used.
They literally can’t. There’s no photographs…
What’s the point? You’re just guessing at the prompt used to generate the photo.
That might be more interesting, actually. AI photo game where you need to guess the prompt.
The path forward as a foundation video model company closed, so they worked hard on end-to-end story creation workflows and mobile.
Turns out that's hard to gain traction and distribution amongst dozens of other similarly shaped startups. So they hack on games and fun viral loops.
Keep at it! This is super clever. You're getting noticed.
Video is going to be huge, and even though power law dictates there will be only a few winners, I think there's space for teams hustling this hard if you can find distribution.
Let the foundation video model companies fight to the death. They've over-raised and are being commoditized by Tencent and Alibaba's open source foundation video models (Hunyuan and Wan). You can use their APIs on the cheap and still provide value. And value will accrue to the application layer.
Focus on what the creators want and need.
https://wikitrivia.tomjwatson.com/