DEV Community

Aayush Gupta
Aayush Gupta

Posted on

WildLens 🌿: An Open Field Naturalist Guide & Quest Engine to Get You Outside

#devchallenge #hf26challenge

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass Submission 🌿

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

What I Built

Most nature apps try to keep you looking at your phone. WildLens was built with the opposite philosophy: make the screen the shortest part of your outdoor experience.

WildLens is an open-source field companion and naturalist guide designed for hikers, curious neighborhood walkers, biology students, and families exploring local parks.

It does three core things:

  1. Snap & Identify: Point your camera at any plant, wildflower, mushroom, bird, or insect. In seconds, you get taxonomic classification (common & scientific names, family), key distinguishing physical markers, and critical field safety precautions (toxic lookalikes, edible traits, safe handling).
  2. Narrated Audio Field Guide: Instead of squinting at a bright screen on the trail, you can tap a button and listen to natural voice narration detailing species behavior and safety notes while keeping your eyes on the trail.
  3. Seasonal Outdoor Quests: Select your environment (city park, conifer forest, wetland, coastline, or your own backyard) and WildLens builds a personalized, season-accurate nature scavenger hunt with interactive checklists and field observation hints.
  4. Offline Field Journal: Log your sightings directly into an offline-first field journal with photos, notes, dates, and taxonomy tags—stored entirely on your device with zero remote tracking.

Demo

Dashboard

  • Live Application: https://wildlens-qkuh.onrender.com/
  • Curated Samples: If you're testing from your desk, the Identify page includes 1-click verified field samples (Monarch Butterfly, Fly Agaric, and Barn Owl) so you can test identification and audio narration immediately.

Code

The complete source code is public and open-source under the MIT license on GitHub:

GitHub logo ayushg-1506 / WildLens

WildLens 🌿

An intuitive field naturalist guide and biodiversity companion. Discover, identify, and document the living world around you.

Live Demo

Overview • Screenshots • Key Features • Tech Stack • Project Structure • Design Principles • License

Overview

WildLens is an open-source nature companion built to get people off their screens and back into the soil. Whether you're hiking a mountain ridge, strolling through a city park, or exploring your own backyard, WildLens transforms curious outdoor walks into rich ecological learning experiences.

Point your camera or upload a photo of any flower, tree bark, raptor, pollinator, or fungi. WildLens instantly delivers taxonomic classification, field safety warnings (toxic lookalikes, edible traits, handling precautions), distinguishing morphological markers, and narrated audio guides.

When you're ready to head outside, generate a Seasonal Outdoor Quest with habitat-specific scavenger hunts and log every observation directly to your private, offline-first Nature Field Journal.

🔗 Live Deployment…


View on GitHub


Direct link: https://github.com/ayushg-1506/WildLens

How I Built It

WildLens is built with a lightweight, modern open-source stack designed for responsiveness and privacy:

  • Next.js & Turbopack (App Router): Fast server and client architecture with clean, minimal bundling.
  • Multimodal AI & Taxonomy Engine: Uses Google's visual intelligence engine with a resilient multi-model fallback wrapper (src/lib/ai.ts) that extracts strict, structured JSON representing taxonomic hierarchy, lookalike distinguishing markers, habitat patterns, and safety warnings.
  • Natural Voice Narration with ElevenLabs: Powered by ElevenLabs for documentary-style naturalist field audio narration, with graceful fallback to browser speech synthesis when offline.
  • Geocoding via OpenStreetMap: Reverse-geocodes coordinates using OpenStreetMap Nominatim to calibrate quest items to local ecosystems without proprietary map SDK lock-ins.
  • Local-First Persistence: The nature journal runs entirely on browser localStorage, ensuring field notes, sightings, and photos stay private and accessible without cell service.
  • Organic Design System: Built with Vanilla CSS design tokens and Tailwind CSS using natural earth tones (forest deep greens, warm ochre, unbleached linen) and botanical typography (Playfair Display & DM Sans).

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

When you are out in nature, software shouldn't get in your way:

  1. Privacy by Default: Outdoor exploration often involves locations near homes, schools, and private trails. By leveraging local browser storage and stateless API inference, WildLens doesn't track users, build behavioral ad profiles, or require account logins.
  2. Community Grounding: Nature is inherently open. Open software enables naturalists, park educators, and hikers to inspect how species safety warnings are structured, modify local flora data, and customize scavenger quests for regional parks.
  3. Resilience & Independence: An open-source model allows swapping runtimes, adding local on-device small models, or hosting independently without fearing vendor lock-in or subscription paywalls on fundamental biodiversity knowledge.

Prize Categories

  • Best Use of Render: WildLens is hosted, built, and continuously deployed as a production Web Service on Render using a native render.yaml blueprint configuration.
  • Best Use of ElevenLabs: Features voice synthesis via the ElevenLabs API to deliver hands-free audio field guides on the trail.

Top comments (0)