[HN Gopher] Show HN: Time Portal - Get dropped into history, gue...
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Show HN: Time Portal - Get dropped into history, guess where you
landed
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.
Author : samplank2
Score : 100 points
Date : 2025-03-12 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eggnog.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eggnog.ai)
| typpo wrote:
| This is so fun and creative. Congrats on launching!
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks for playing it!
| darkstar_16 wrote:
| Loved it. Congratulations on the launch.
| samplank2 wrote:
| thank you for playing!
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Super cool! Tried a couple of rounds, will try it with my oldest
| kid who's very into history tomorrow, I'm sure he'll love it.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks for playing! Let me know what your kid thinks
| renewiltord wrote:
| These are beautiful! Great stuff.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Appreciate it!
| voisin wrote:
| This is killer. Love it! Are you planning to monetize it or
| keeping it as is?
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks for playing! No immediate plans to paywall the game, but
| we do eventually want to make money from it in some capacity.
|
| ---
|
| 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.
| baal80spam wrote:
| This is really cool, congratulations!
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks so much!
| stingrae wrote:
| My first reaction is that the scoring is too harsh. I got within
| 50 years and 100 km and the resulting score is 7,406 / 10,000.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Yeah the scoring can be pretty harsh. You should be able to see
| your percentile overall and for each round on the results page.
| maratc wrote:
| I got within 15 years and 200 km but got 7,275 / 10,000. If the
| expectation is to absolutely nail it, I can hardly imagine who
| is it for.
| samplank2 wrote:
| My hope is that one day there is a Rainbolt for Time Portal.
| For someone like that to exist, the game has to be hard. That
| said, I agree the scoring could definitely use some
| improvement!
| _Rabs_ wrote:
| Strange your website isn't working on Mullvad's Browser.
|
| On the Guess page it just has a blank screen with the 4 cinematic
| clips below...
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know
| moffkalast wrote:
| Seeing the same on Chrome actually.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| This is a great idea - loved it!
|
| And I'd love to see the idea expanded further. "AI recreations of
| historical scenes" is an idea with tons of interesting potential.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thank you! We have plans to expand it! We've been hearing from
| a few teachers that they like playing Time Portal with their
| class because it helps the kids empathize with people in the
| past. There are some really fun possibilities just in the
| learning space and more in gaming.
| bthater wrote:
| The super anachronistic output makes this really difficult. One
| of the examples was the battle in the war of the roses but all
| the imagery suggests over a hundred years later.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Yeah fair point. The game still has an issue with details
| creeping in that are not correct. I believe we can get these
| types of errors down quite a bit though.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Apparently the song dynasty had billowing smoke stacks from the
| late 19th century. But overall the game is cool and fun.
| nl wrote:
| I had a "War of Roses" image too and was way off on it too. The
| flags and sigals were completely wrong.
|
| I guessed it was supposed to be Agincourt because of the
| prominence of archers.
| cflewis wrote:
| I enjoyed this a lot. Congratulations :)
| samplank2 wrote:
| Appreciate it!
| backprop1989 wrote:
| This is awesome! Definitely some more obscure historical events
| in there. Agree that the scoring is a bit harsh, especially since
| the clips are, let's say, somewhat impressionistic.
|
| Excellent idea and can't wait for the next version.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thank you!
| Mobius01 wrote:
| I love the concept! A really compelling game , especially for
| history nerds like me. Two thoughts:
|
| 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
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thank you! Appreciate the kind words and the feedback.
| Definitely need to improve on both fronts!
| cdjk wrote:
| This is awesome. I had the same feeling I had when I first played
| GeoGuessr. It's one of the first times I've seen what is
| obviously AI-generated video used in a super compelling way. I
| want to keep playing.
|
| 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.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words and for the feedback! Good call about
| PG mode. We also want this to be usable in classrooms so that
| would definitely help.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| So there is a similar thing with a photo from (recent) history -
| and that has the edge of perfect accuracy - a picture of 1920s
| Alabama is a real representation.
|
| 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.
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| As an Indian, The irony wasn't lost on me when I placed the
| marker on West Indies (Caribbean islands) when the actual Spot
| was East India.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Haha yeah some of them are pretty tricky
| Delomomonl wrote:
| What a fun idea :)
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks!
| dmje wrote:
| Really fun, well executed. I like :-)
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thank you!
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| I love the idea, but GenAI isn't really up to it. The images are
| awful - like a Hammer Horror/Netflix-does-history vibe, but it's
| strangely addictive!
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| In this History football (soccer) is played with 2 balls. Who
| knew?!
| qwertox wrote:
| I could imagine this to become a pastime for curious kids, and
| parents having nothing against them spending time on it. It still
| needs development and quality improvements, but that is a
| direction I could imagine it taking.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Totally, I really hope it inspires a love of history in kids.
| Oras wrote:
| This is truly remarkable- one of the best use cases for text-to-
| video products! Lots of fun with learning aspect
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thank you!
| dartos wrote:
| I was excited by the title until I saw it was all AI :(
|
| 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.
| echelon wrote:
| YC funded a bunch of AI video companies (4+), and AFAICT the
| Eggnog folks are hustling the hardest.
|
| 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.
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thanks for the support!
| Vaslo wrote:
| Ignore the AI comments, this app is so much more flexible with
| it, and the pictures will only get better. Great idea for an app!
| samplank2 wrote:
| Thank you!
| kdamica wrote:
| Cool idea but the AI images are kind of lame. For anyone who
| wants something like this I recommend NYT's Flashback quiz:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/upshot/flashb...
| lukev wrote:
| yeah it's a cool concept, but knowing what I know about the
| ability of generative AI to accurately replicate specific moments
| of history, it falls flat.
|
| The whole point of this kind of thing should be to reward people
| who can recognize "that architectural style wasn't invented until
| the 13th century" but that's precisely the sort of thing image
| models cannot do reliably.
| samplank2 wrote:
| I agree that it's not possible to have them do 13th century
| architectural style perfectly right now. But I believe it will
| be soon. The image/video models are improving, but so are the
| reasoning models, and they can check for and fix anachronisms.
| lukev wrote:
| I hope you're right. Are you aware of any image-gen models
| that apply chain-of-thought style reasoning (either agentic
| or via reinforcment learning to shape outputs?)
|
| For example, consider this imagery from today's challenge: ht
| tps://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/fastab-f08e9.app...
|
| These are some _incredible_ monoliths: if they were real, I
| feel like I would have heard about them? And if they did...
| that 's so cool. But because it's AI generated, I have a very
| low confidence level that this ever existed at all. Which is
| sad.
| samplank2 wrote:
| No, not aware of image models that do chain-of-thought
| reasoning. But there are vision models that do it, so you
| can have them review the generated images and iterate on
| the prompts.
| nl wrote:
| Reasoning models aren't needed for this. The loss function
| for the image models needs to take year into account.
|
| This is entirely possible, as the incredible accuracy[1] of
| non-generative picture location models (a very similar
| problem) shows.
|
| [1] https://paperswithcode.com/sota/image-based-localization-
| on-...
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Why not using img2vid starting from an historically accurate
| picture or painting?
| baud147258 wrote:
| 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
| joshdavham wrote:
| This was awesome! I think this project is super creative and
| original. Also, I got top 63%!
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