OBSERVE

Your Neighborhood Is Already an Expedition

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass.

What I Built

The 20-20-20 rule says to look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes.

It doesn't mean you need to stare at your screen for 20 minutes, then book a trip to mountains 2,000 km away and climb 5,000 feet to finally touch grass.

You can start exploring right outside your door.

Meet OBSERVE : Look closer. Your neighbourhood is alive.

You don't need a forest, a hiking trail, or an expensive trip to discover something interesting. There are entire ecosystems hiding in the cracks of your neighbourhood.

OBSERVE turns an ordinary walk into a small expedition. It encourages you to notice things you would usually walk past: plants growing through concrete, birds on rooftops, insects near streetlights, the food being prepared at a local shop, something being repaired, or a small act of care happening around you.

Here's the catch: your phone is the notebook, not the experience.

Start an expedition, put your phone away, and observe the world. Come back to record what you noticed, save a field note, and reflect on it. You can also try Blind Walk prompts, document things that seem out of place, and revisit saved observations through Time Capsule.

OBSERVE is for anyone who wants to spend more time outside and pay closer attention to where they already live.

Demo

Live app: Observe

Code

GitHub repository: GitHub Repository

How I Built It

OBSERVE is built with React, TypeScript, Vite, and an Express backend. It uses browser storage for the field notebook, so the core experience doesn't depend on an AI service being available.

Gemma is an optional AI enhancement, not a requirement for using the app. When configured, it can help turn a completed expedition into a short reflection, identify a pattern in the user's written observations, and suggest a small observation quest for tomorrow. If AI is unavailable, the core journal experience can still work with a deterministic fallback.

I wanted the product to be useful before adding AI to it. The most important interaction isn't generating text — it's getting someone to put the phone away and pay attention to the world.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

An outdoor observation app shouldn't need a proprietary AI service just to help someone reflect on a walk.

Open-weight models like Gemma give developers room to experiment with how AI fits into their products, adapt prompts and outputs, and build optional AI experiences without making the entire application dependent on a closed model API.

It also makes the architecture more flexible: the field notebook and observation workflow remain useful without AI, while an open model can add another layer when it's available.

That distinction matters to me. AI should make the real-world experience richer, not give people another reason to stay glued to their screens.

And open innovation makes it easier for other developers to inspect the project, extend its ideas, and build their own versions for their neighborhoods.

My Agent Session

I used an agent-assisted development workflow to build OBSERVE, implement its core experiences, and refine the app. (Add a DevRelay agent session link here if you have one to share.)

Prize Categories

• Render
• Gemma (optional integration)

The goal is simple: close the app, step outside, and notice one thing you would have missed yesterday.

What is one thing in your neighborhood that you've walked past a hundred times without really noticing?