Immersive time travel: How AI video stories are bringing small-town NZ history to life

Saturday, 13 June 2026

A new wave of AI “time travel” videos is bringing New Zealand history to life through immersive, first-person tales, shining fresh light on the 19th-century stories of small towns like Greymouth, Ōamaru and Huntly.

Viewers are dropped into gold-rush streets, coal mines and colonial settlements, guided by a “time traveller based in New Zealand” who narrates history as if it is unfolding in real time.

The man behind the main character is Auckland-based filmmaker and immersive storyteller Alex Davila. Within just a month, his Time Travel New Zealand project has taken off across social media, with 11 videos attracting thousands of followers and millions of views.

“The response has been pretty surreal. The Instagram page alone has grown to more than 14,000 followers,” Davila said.

“I’m now getting messages from schools wanting to show the videos in classrooms, heritage groups, and local Māori contacts keen to collaborate.”

In the videos – which are typically between one and five minutes long – Davila appears as a curious traveller wandering through New Zealand’s past.

Dressed in a weather-battered coat, sturdy boots and carrying a distinctive umbrella that doubles as his “unofficial time machine”, he reacts to the sights around him with the wonder of someone stepping into another century.

The character is deliberately approachable.

“The time traveller idea lets me enter history in a playful way,” Davila said. “I’m not presenting myself as the final expert. I’m more like a curious traveller arriving in the past and learning with the audience.”

He says part of the appeal is seeing smaller towns that rarely take centre stage become important parts of the stories .

“A lot of the time stories are about Auckland or Wellington, but it’s never about some of these smaller towns. People are really appreciating that someone has decided to give a bit of a spotlight to where they live — it gives them that warm fuzzy feeling.”

That local focus is intentional. Davila said he noticed similar AI history projects overseas often centred on ancient Rome or Egypt, and wanted to take a different approach.

“My job is not to make it about some elves or hobbits,” he said.

“It’s about the actual cool things that happened in New Zealand and making those locations part of the story.”

While the videos look effortless on screen, Davila says accuracy is the most time-consuming part of the process, and though he is not a historian he is meticulous with his research.

Before each episode, he visits locations, photographs sites, speaks with locals, consults museums and works through archives of historical photographs and records. He also works with a Māori adviser to ensure cultural references and te reo Māori are treated appropriately.

That attention to detail carries through even in the smallest elements on screen. In one of his first episodes, on Huntly coal mining – which grew from a virtual reality project he created for the town’s museum – a bright yellow canary leads miners underground, a detail Davila says was carefully checked for accuracy rather than added for effect.

“It had to be a canary,” he said. “I sent photos [of the bird] to the museum and they would say, ‘No, that one’s too big. It has to be smaller’.”

In the Greymouth goldfields, a sharply dressed businessman appears carrying a small pouch of gold nuggets on his way to the bank, while muddy floodwaters run through the streets at knee height.

“The town sits low at the river mouth, so it’s always vulnerable. The floods of 1867 and 1868 were some of the worst the town has ever seen,” the businessman tells Davila in the video.

Behind the project is more than a decade of experience in immersive storytelling.

Davila moved to New Zealand from Panama as a teenager after being inspired by filmmaker Peter Jackson and The Lord of the Rings.

He later founded immersive storytelling company Conical and became a finalist for Young New Zealand Innovator of the Year in 2016 after producing what is widely described as New Zealand’s first virtual reality film, The Green Fairy.

For Davila, the technology has changed, but the goal has not.

“Storytelling is at the core of it,” he said. “Whether it’s virtual reality or AI, the technology is secondary. Storytelling is the key component.”

The project also became more personal after he became a father.

“When my wife and I had our first child, something changed in me. I started thinking more about the country my son is going to grow up in and the stories sitting all around us.

“I wanted to understand those places better, not as a historian giving a lecture, but as a dad, filmmaker and curious traveller trying to learn as I go.”

The most challenging episode so far has been his recreation of the Pink and White Terraces, once known as the “eighth wonder of the world” before they were destroyed in the 1886 eruption of Mt Tarawera.

Unlike his other videos, Davila could not visit the location or compare his work with what exists today.

Instead, he relied on historical accounts, archival images and AI tools to reconstruct what the famous terraces may have looked like before the eruption.

The video struck a chord with many viewers and led to an invitation from Rotorua iwi during events commemorating the 140th anniversary of the eruption on Wednesday.

“It resonated with people because it allowed them to see a piece of New Zealand history that has been lost,” he said.

He describes the videos as “a humble hook” — an invitation to explore local museums, heritage sites and the stories behind them.

For now, the next destination remains undecided. “The audience is dictating my itinerary,” he said.

And for a time traveller, that seems as good a travel plan as any.