What country you would hit if you went straight where you're pointing
This app was designed to answer my wife’s question “what country would we hit if we went straight” (generally posed while pointing her phone) But with two additional twists: 1. It loads up historical maps from different years (right now 1 BC, 700 AD, 1000 AD, 1300 AD, 1800 AD, 1900 AD) so you can see what you would hit if you had a time machine AND you went in the direction your phone is pointing 2. Tap a country/territory for an (AI-generated) blurb on what you are pointing at How it works: Starting from your phone’s bearing, we trace the great-circle in 200 km steps, prefilter…
In plain words
This app answers the question "what country would you hit if you went straight in the direction you're pointing?" by using a phone's compass to trace a great-circle path across a map. It includes historical maps from 1 BC through 1900 AD, showing what users would encounter at different points in time. Tapping on any country displays an AI-generated description of that location. The app is designed for curious travelers and geography enthusiasts wanting to explore global directions and historical geography.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
This app was designed to answer my wife’s question “what country would we hit if we went straight” (generally posed while pointing her phone) But with two additional twists: 1. It loads up historical maps from different years (right now 1 BC, 700 AD, 1000 AD, 1300 AD, 1800 AD, 1900 AD) so you can see what you would hit if you had a time machine AND you went in the direction your phone is pointing 2. Tap a country/territory for an (AI-generated) blurb on what you are pointing at How it works: Starting from your phone’s bearing, we trace the great-circle in 200 km steps, prefilter candidate countries with bounding boxes (~5–10 instead of ~200), then check ~20 km points along each segment to catch coastlines and stop when the path first enters another country. Great-circles (https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/latlong.html) are why you can hit Australia from NYC, even though when you look at a flat map that can be hard to see. There might be some weird stuff in the explanations, I haven’t read all 1,400 of them. If you see something weird let me know and I will update it! The app is free and doesn’t have ads or tracking — your location and bearing are only used locally to figure out where you are and what you’re pointing at Probably will work best if you hold your phone pretty flat :) Thank you to André Ourednik and all the contributors to the Historical Basemaps project: https://github.com/aourednik/historical-basemaps)
Does the same job
all alternatives →- TPTime Portal – Get dropped into history, guess where you landed2025 · eggnog.ai · ▲497
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…
- PMPlot modern addresses on Earth 240M years ago2018 · dinosaurpictures.org · ▲384
What’s in that direction?Jan 2026 · ▲129A compass that shows landmarks, sunrise/sunset + golden hour
- AMA map that shows you how far you can go for a given time or distance2018 · oalley.net · ▲455
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, August 2025
the whole month →
- IS
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
Work · 2025 · benholmen.com
- KT
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
Dev tools · 2025 · github.com
- IW
I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
- TC
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca