Welcome to the AI living time machine for Troy. Immerse yourself in this portal that turns historical records—old books, archives, even history podcasts—into short, narrated videos generated by AI.
Watch Troy's past unfold as vivid, story-driven scenes: battles, landmark openings, and everyday life across five centuries.
Select an era from the timeline below to explore Troy's rich history. Each decade reveals stories of growth, struggle, innovation, and transformation that shaped this remarkable city.
Primary Historical Resources:
This project was created for HackRPI 2025 with the theme "Retro vs Modern," demonstrating how modern AI technology can bring historical narratives to life in engaging, accessible ways.
We are grateful to all the historians, archivists, and storytellers who have worked to preserve Troy's rich history for future generations.
We built the system as a modular pipeline, wiring together separate components for data collection, AI generation, and presentation. First, we wrote Python scrapers to pull text from historical books, curated web pages, and podcast descriptions, then parsed that text into sentences, extracted years, and bucketed events by decade before calling the Gemini API to generate clean summaries into CSV files.
Those CSVs feed into an "AI director" stage, another Gemini prompt that turns each decade's summaries into structured scene descriptions. We then pass those scene descriptions to a "Narration Module" using ElevenLabs' text-to-speech API to generate professional audio narration for each decade.
Next, we pass the scene descriptions to an "AI artist" stage, where a Stable Diffusion pipeline renders one image per scene. Finally, "The Editor" uses Python tooling (e.g., moviepy/ffmpeg) to combine the narrated audio with the generated images, stitching everything together into cohesive video clips.
The result is wrapped in this simple GUI that indexes videos by decade, letting users browse the generated archive and watch the history of Troy unfold chapter by chapter.