Great concept. I'm an avid geoguessr and wikitrivia player, you're definitely onto something here.
I built a prototype version similar to this called PastPort last year, but I like your idea better.
This uses Flux then image to video? Good quality generations, it would be wonderful to see the accuracy of the images improve. I saw you want to make it interactive like moving mode in geoguessr; that would be fantastic. I can imagine a few ways to do both.
I don't believe this is open source - is there a way to contribute to this? One man operation or are you a team?
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.
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?
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.
> 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
>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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for playing! No immediate plans to paywall the game, but we do eventually want to make money from it in some capacity.
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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.
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.
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.
I really liked it but felt some of the image hints were a bit ambiguous at times which annoyed me.
I had one for the US purchase of Alaska which I got from the images of Americans building log cabins in an icy landscape and another image showing an American signing a document. I assumed it would be either Washington or Alaska (Anchorage I guess), but wasn't sure which because it depends on if you weight the signing of the agreement over the building of US settlements. It could have been either given the images were of different locations.
Similarly I had picture of British dude creating telescopes and realised it was very likely Herschel. But I also knew Herschels early work was done in Bath, while his most famous telescope was built later in Slough. Again, it wasn't entirely clear which location it would have been referring to.
Maybe I'm just being stupid though. I think you could have argued that right answers in both cases were more likely to be Washington and Bath.
That said, I really really liked it and think you have something here. Personally I'd play this over Geoguessr any day and I'll show my GF it tomorrow because I think she'll also like the history aspect of it.
Also, might worth lowering the distance penalty if someone guesses the right country, but the wrong point? Events in large countries are more risky just because of their size. Eg, if an event happened in France but you click Germany you'll often get less of a distance penalty than correctly guessing an event happened in the US but clicking the wrong part of the US.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and for the kind words! Yeah the situations you pointed out like Washington/Alaska where it's not being consistent in the depiction of a location aren't great and will be improved. I'm kind of torn about what to do on the distance scoring. On the one hand, I see your point that knowing the country should count for something, but it currently doesn't count for much if the country is big and you get the wrong side of the country. On the other hand, doing that would make the scoring system more complicated, and it's already not particularly easy to understand.
I have been building a kind-of geography guessing game in a similar vein. Mine has a solo mode and a party-game mode and doesn't use any AI. I'd love to hear some feedback.
I found the centrality of AI generated video to be quite distasteful. I had a visceral negative reaction to it, which probably speaks to how much AI slop is polluting my life in other places. I would have much preferred a game based on actual historical photographs.
I understand, it's not for everyone. The game will always be based in AI generated renditions though, because it removes the constraints on which events can be depicted.
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.