With just four days, a clear vision and a dedicated team of CGI experts, we developed an innovative solution for AI-supported video scenario creation at the NATO TIDE Hackathon 2025. Our efforts won the silver medal in the AI-Driven Video Generation challenge category.
The hackathon, organized by Allied Command Transformation (ACT), is NATO’s Strategic Warfare Development Command. Its mission is to contribute to preserving the peace, security and territorial integrity of Alliance member states by leading the strategic warfare development of military structures, forces, capabilities and doctrines.
Every year, the NATO TIDE Hackathon brings together international experts from the military, industry, research agencies and start-ups. The objective is to develop practical prototypes that contribute to NATO's digital operational capability in line with the theme, “Innovate. Test. Deliver.” The event location rotates annually. In 2025, the hackathon took place in Dunkirk, France.
As a partner in Defense & intelligence, our participation offers an opportunity to create tangible value for modern defense solutions, closely aligned with our clients' needs and to drive innovation forward.
The NATO Wargaming Branch was looking for a solution to visualize complex simulation game scenarios quickly and clearly, while ensuring compatibility with isolated, highly secure IT environments. The goal was to automatically generate images and videos from text-based descriptions (prompts), ideally through a user-friendly interface with built-in storyboard functionality.
Our team developed a functional prototype in just four days:
- AI-generated images and videos: Text input is automatically converted into images and animated clips by locally-operated AI models such as Stable Diffusion within the ComfyUI platform.
- Storyboard function via timeline: Users can arrange clips into a complete visual story using drag and drop. For example, this allows users to illustrate the progression of a scenario.
- Modern interface with Vue.js: The intuitive web front end is based on Vue.js and Beautify. It is easy to use, even without prior knowledge of AI.
- Communication via REST and SSE: Interaction between the front end and back end takes place via modern interfaces. Representation state transfer (REST) is for triggering generation, while server-sent events (SSE) is for real-time progress monitoring.
- Full NATO compatibility: All components run locally without cloud or third-party APIs. The solution works completely within isolated networks.
- Modular and adaptable: The architecture is model agnostic. AI components can be replaced or adapted depending on security requirements.
Our solution received 93 out of 100 points, and awarded the silver medal in the category. The jury praised our intuitive operation, technical maturity level, clarity of creation and strong focus on NATO-compatible implementation.
NATO has adopted the prototype for internal evaluation and is currently assessing how the it can be integrated into NATO's existing AI framework. The goal is to build on the prototype’s existing capabilities:
We are also exploring additional scenarios and business cases to deliver added value to our clients. Beyond defense applications, the underlying approach of the solution holds potential for a wide range of non-defense use cases, such as:
Learn more about this topic and our other AI solutions such as NATO’s first AI-supported modular “knowledge agent” or connect with our experts.
