History Comes Alive: Immersive AI Experiences in the History Classroom

I taught history for fifteen years. And I still remember students' eyes glazing over when I lectured on medieval treaties or the silver standard in the U.S. But I also remember the spark—how their faces literally lit up — when we simulated historical events or staged historical debates. I wrote about one such simulation in Social Education years ago, a “Day in the Life of a Teenage Hobo Project.” Students researched teenage homelessness during the Great Depression, wrote a story as if they were a teenage hobo, and then I interviewed them in character for a “1930s radio show.” To this day, former students tell me it’s what they remember most from my class.

Back then, we had tangerine-colored “iBooks” (forerunners to MacBooks) with little software and a sporadic internet connection. Today, teachers and students have powerful and immersive multimodal AI.

AI tools today enable students to simulate historically plausible scenes with photorealistic characters, natural voice synthesis, and interactive scripts. With a bit of scaffolding, students can direct historical scenes that help deepen understanding, spark inquiry, promote engagement, and provoke critical reflection. And while some teachers may hesitate—lack of tech know-how, lack of time — these tools are straightforward to use and their hyper-realistic outputs come quickly.

As we all know, the past doesn’t come alive in textbooks. But it can come alive in student scripts and student video, all made vivid by the tools now at our disposal.

The New Reality: AI Characters and Their Popularity with Young People

AI chatbots are often characterized as passive information dispensers. The reality is that AI chatbots are often the source of interactive exploration by young people, encouraging them to engage in dialogue and express their ideas.

With over 20 million monthly active users and more than 60% of U.S. traffic from users under 25, Character.AI has become a digital playground for teens and tweens The platform already boasts some of the highest engagement rates among Gen Z, not because of its technology alone, but because it mirrors how young people now prefer to engage—with agency, visual storytelling, and dialogue.

Character.AI is now pushing into the realm of video. You can use it to generate videos featuring your own characters using Character.AI's new AI tools.

Among Character.AI’s new video offerings is AvatarFX, an image-to-video tool that animates a character's avatar to speak, engage, and even sing with users.

The mobile app now includes "Scenes," which lets users step into interactive, prepopulated storylines with favorite characters, with custom scene creation coming later this summer. Another feature, "Streams," allows users to generate video "moments" between two characters based on a chosen topic, rolling out this week on both mobile and web.

Additionally, Character.AI Plus subscribers can use "Imagine Animated Chats" to animate and share moments from their character chats on social media. With its AvatarFX feature and "Scenes" capability, students can create historically plausible exchanges between characters using realistic video renderings.

Character.AI is not without its controversies, but tools like AvatarFX and Imagine Animated Chats allow teachers and students to bring historical figures to life, making them speak in dialogue based on accurate representations.. Features like Scenes and Streams enable interactive storytelling, allowing students to explore or even create historical scenarios. We can now simulate conversations that did happen, those that could have, and others we can imagine, illuminating possibilities, contradictions, and making students wrestle with big questions.

A New Generation of Multimedia AI Tools

Character.AI’s AvatarFX is but one of a wave of new multimodal tools transforming what’s possible in the classroom. Text-to-video, image-to-video, text-to-music and other types of multimedia generation tools are becoming more powerful, accessible, and flexible for classroom use.

Here’s a rundown of some powerful and popular tools:

Sora (OpenAI): Generates high-quality, cinematic video from a simple text prompt. It hints at what future educational storytelling could become—video production with historical accuracy and creativity driven by student ideas. (Currently accessible with limitations via Microsoft Bing mobile.)

Runway: Offers text-to-video generation with fine-tuned control over style and motion. Students could animate a scene from Versailles or recreate a protest march from the 1960s.

Synthesia: Create AI avatars that speak scripted text in multiple languages. Ideal for delivering student-written monologues or speeches as realistic character presentations.

Veo (Google DeepMind): Veo aims to generate high-fidelity video from detailed prompts. When released, it may allow for student-created cinematic reenactments of historical events. It's moving beyond "development" and is being integrated into platforms like Google Vids and Vertex AI.

HeyGen: Turn text into high-resolution, lip-synced talking avatar videos. Extremely easy to use for student projects, though limited to short video durations unless on paid plans.

Complementary tools:

Luma AI & Odyssey: Generate immersive, navigable 3D environments. Think of a student walking through the streets of ancient Rome or exploring a medieval marketplace.

Suno: Generates original music and soundtracks from prompts. Students can score their historical scene with period-appropriate sounds or music.

Naturally, there are also history-focused tools designed to create an immersive experience, though they lack the cutting-edge multimedia AI of the tools listed above:

• Hello History AI by Humy is an AI-driven app that enables students to have life-like conversations historical figures.

• Yorescape is a virtual exploration platform designed to transport students through time and space to experience historical sites as they once were.

• Google Arts & Culture leverages artificial intelligence to enhance our understanding of art and its cultural importance.

• Time Portal is an interactive time-travel game that lets players explore and experience different historical eras through immersive storytelling, quests, and character interactions.

• AI Time Machine uses artificial intelligence to generate hyper-realistic images of individuals as they might have appeared in various historical periods.

Together, these tools allow for student-focused immersion of multisensory, historically inspired creations. While not all are free or fully accessible yet, most are rapidly expanding access and lowering barriers.

So, the best is yet to come.

Immersive Possibilities: Bringing History to Life

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Historical reenactments have long been a staple of classroom instruction, offering students the chance to embody the past through costume, speech, and structured scenes. When done well, video reenactments can help students understand sequence, context, and perspective. But because reenactments are often bound by what is documented, they can also limit students’ creative freedom.

In contrast, reimagining history with AI allows students to pose counterfactuals and simulate encounters that never happened, but could be instructive if explored. What if Harriet Tubman met Rosa Parks and shared strategies for resistance? What if Sitting Bull testified before Congress? What if Joan of Arc met Pope Leo? Reimagined simulations push students into analysis, speculation, and synthesis, and can foster creativity and critical thinking. The risk, of course, is that they can drift into speculative fiction not grounded in evidence.

Fertile middle ground might lie in simulating events that happened, but inventing conversations, decisions, or events that might have occurred behind the scenes. Imagine students scripting an encounter between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln just before the Emancipation Proclamation. Or a private argument between suffragettes with conflicting strategies on the eve of a major protest. These situations are historically plausible and can be deeply engaging.

But not all dialogue deserves cinematic treatment. A video should be used for scenes where the visual and auditory context adds historical insight.

Keep in mind, video adds a distinctive dimension. Facial expressions, gestures, background environments, and period-specific audio can all contribute to a richer, fuller sense of historical context. Keep that in mind as you select appropriate scenes to film.

Some suggestions:

• A confrontation between a child laborer and a factory owner in 1880s New York would be more impactful if set inside a noisy, grimy factory.

• A dusty, windblown Okie camp during the Great Depression, underscored with bleak music and visuals, would deepen the emotional impact of a story on a migrant family’s struggle.

• A political argument at a suffrage rally comes alive when ambient crowd noise, signage, and clothing reflect period tension - details students would have to research and embed in their video scenes.

Other ideas:

• Marie Antoinette walking the gardens at Versailles, reflecting on her portrayal by the public.

• A youngster in the Spartan army undergoes training and grapples with fear.

• A Salem woman accused of witchcraft pleads her innocence.

• Gandhi sitting across from British officials during the Salt March negotiations, underscoring cultural power dynamics

• A day in the life of Napoleon, full of battle and diplomacy.

• A Black Union soldier confronting a white officer about unequal pay, shot in a Civil War camp

• A student protestor talking to officials at Kent State moments before the shootings.

• A British soldier confronting a Massachetts farmer at the beginning of the American Revolution

Reimagining history examples:

• Confucius confronts Mao Zedong in modern Beijing about morality, tradition, and governance

• Joan of Arc visits Hatshepsut in ancient Egypt and challenges her on the role of divine authority and leadership.

• A medieval monk watches a livestream of the French Revolution, reacting to Enlightenment ideals and secular uprisings with horror.

• Elizabeth I and Margaret Thatcher appear on a fictional political talk show, debating the role of women in power and how history judges leadership.

• An Incan astronomer explains their worldview to Galileo, provoking discussion on cosmology and Eurocentrism
  

The goal is that the video isn’t just illustrating the conversation. Ideally, it’s immersing the viewer in historical experience. And students, in constructing these scenes, must stop and think: What did this place sound like? What symbols mattered? What sounds matter? What emotions need be conveyed?

When students script a scene, say, between Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great, they must research context, understand competing viewpoints, and build arguments with nuance. They must think like historians. As such, video production becomes more than a novelty. It morphs into a historically grounded design challenge, integrating research, empathy, and narrative craft.

New Storytellers of History

Students today live in a world of avatars, storyworlds, and interactive media. At times we may fight it, other times we will harness it. With immersive AI tools, students can write, direct, and perform historical scences, gaining deeper understanding and empathy through creation. Done right, these simulations aren’t a distraction from real learning. They are learning—rooted in research, shaped by understanding, and driven by curiosity.

Let your students try. Like me, you’ll find that the most powerful historical moment in your classroom isn’t in your textbook.

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