Show HN: Time Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed
102 comments
·March 12, 2025keyle
This is cool, but I'm not sure some of the hints are not more red herrings than anything else. Because AI sort of blends things, the prompt needs to be spot on or, for example, India starts looking like any part of the middle east. Traditional China looks like Japan, etc.
Also some of the temporal clues were very good, some were 'wtf'.
I also laughed at some of the hallucination I witnessed. Like a group of people staring in a telescope pointing straight at a white wall.
Fun though, just needs to be honed in a little.
It would help to have markers on the timeline for the different ages, at least for the first round! e.g. Bronze age.
You already sort of do, being a Gregorian timeline and marking 0 AD as Christ's birth. That's a dead giveaway when you see crosses. So I think it would be fair and useful to give a range of eras as markers on the timeline.
The map could also be continental, and the locations more precise than the country.
The map could be more exciting, and change based on the timeline selection! It's currently showing the "current" map and not the map of the era; which in some respect is relevant.
Finally, the scoring could be more explanatory, you got 5,000 / 10,000 for the following reason / calculation method. Maybe a graph of points per time correction and location. It could also be more comprehensive scoring, with a slight multiplier for streaks, a badge for being good at temporal location vs. geolocation etc.
Scoring could animate up, to gamify the experience, create a sort of level end screen that builds up excitement. The map could animate and so could the timeline in this end phase.
I like the idea, there is a lot you could do to push this further.
samplank2
Thanks for the feedback and the ideas! Is your idea about showing the ages just to make it a bit easier if you don't know exactly when different ages started and ended?
keyle
Yeah slightly easier and also educative if you think about it.
It also dresses up the timeline so that the game gets its own identity.
kdamica
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...
cdjk
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
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.
lelandfe
> 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.
hot_gril
Still more accurate most of the time than a lot of historical video games at least.
I got a trippy one that was supposed to be about Da Vinci painting the Last Supper, but the people were moving, so I thought it was supposed to be the actual supper: https://www.eggnog.ai/timeportal/56571c14-8f13-48ba-b60f-d82...
slg
>Still more accurate most of the time than a lot of historical video games at least.
This game is much closer to Trivial Pursuit than it is Assassin's Creed. The importance of accuracy depends on the type of game and when the point of the game is specifically testing the player's knowledge, a lack of accuracy is game-breaking.
baud147258
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
samplank2
Yeah, fair enough. Glad you had fun!
lukev
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
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.
peishang
You might look into era specific LoRas if they exist, and if not consider training a few to help better capture architectural detail from that specific time frame.
lukev
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: https://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
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
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
Why not using img2vid starting from an historically accurate picture or painting?
samplank2
This does use img2vid but with AI generated images. Using real pictures or paintings could definitely be fun too.
vunderba
Very polished UI/UX. I'd say this is far closer in similarity to TimeGuessr than GeoGuessr. The only difference is that in TimeGuessr you are guessing a year and a location based on a single real image whereas Time Portal is making heavy use of GenAI for image/videos. Anything I'm missing?
OP: You might also want to change the title in your HTML header for the game - it just says Eggnog which is kinda funny but not sure if that was intentional.
polishdude20
Interesting that the AI makes many of the outdoor structures look ancient rather than how they'd look in the time period. People walking over crumbling ancient roads whole fallen ruins loom over them isn't exactly accurate.
samplank2
Definitely some issues to be improved in the game, but I think these sorts of errors can be driven down.
stingrae
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.
maratc
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
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!
samplank2
Yeah the scoring can be pretty harsh. You should be able to see your percentile overall and for each round on the results page.
skort
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.
samplank2
I understand if you don't like AI art. If Time Portal inspires anyone to learn more about history, I will be happy.
hot_gril
Pleasantly surprised that the first one with Christian symbols in Africa was something I happen to know exactly
samplank2
that's great!
ddxv
I really enjoy time guessr! Playing it on the TV with family is fun too.
chrysander
I was about to suggest this as well - great game! Maybe you want to add https://games.oec.world/en/tradle/ to the routine
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.