🌿 TouchGrass AI — Less Scrolling, More Living
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass.
What I Built
TouchGrass AI is a nature-inspired web application designed to help people spend less time staring at screens and more time exploring the real world.
We spend hours scrolling through our phones, often forgetting the simple experiences waiting outside. TouchGrass AI aims to change that by turning the idea of going outdoors into small, enjoyable, and achievable adventures.
🌱 What can you do with TouchGrass AI?
- 🌳 Personalized outdoor missions: Discover activities based on your mood, available time, and interests.
- 🎯 Simple challenges: Turn free time into an opportunity to explore nature.
- 📚 Adventure history: Keep track of completed outdoor activities.
- ❤️ Save your favorites: Bookmark missions you want to try later.
- 📱 Responsive design: Enjoy a clean, nature-inspired interface across different screen sizes.
- 🔒 Browser-based storage: Save your missions and activity history locally using
localStorage.
The project is designed for students, busy professionals, nature lovers, and anyone who wants to build healthier digital habits.
The main idea is simple: use technology as a bridge to the real world, not as a replacement for it.
The current version is a functional front-end prototype. Its mission recommendations use predefined JavaScript rules; integration with an actual open-weight AI model is a planned next step.
Demo
🌐 Live Website: https://devanshguptacu-create.github.io/TouchGrass-AI/
Explore the website, select your preferences, discover an outdoor mission, and take your first step toward spending more time outside!
Code
💻 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/devanshguptacu-create/TouchGrass-AI
The project is built with standard web technologies:
- HTML5 — Application structure
- CSS3 — Responsive design and nature-inspired styling
- Vanilla JavaScript — Mission generation, navigation, and user interactions
- localStorage — Local persistence for saved missions and activity history
To run the project locally:
git clone https://github.com/devanshguptacu-create/TouchGrass-AI.git
cd TouchGrass-AI
Then open index.html in your browser.
How I Built It
I built TouchGrass AI with a simple principle in mind: the screen should be the starting point of the experience, not the destination.
I used HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript to create an interactive, responsive interface. Users can choose their preferences, discover suitable outdoor activities, save missions, and track their progress.
The current recommendation system uses a predefined collection of activities and JavaScript logic to suggest missions. Browser localStorage keeps saved activities and history available between visits on the same browser.
What about open-source AI?
The current version does not yet integrate an open-weight AI model or local inference framework. Adding an open-source model for more flexible, context-aware outdoor recommendations is a planned development goal.
Potential next steps include exploring open-weight models and browser-based inference tools such as Transformers.js, subject to model compatibility, performance, and licensing requirements.
I want to develop the project toward a system where AI helps people discover meaningful real-world experiences without making screen time the main activity.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Open innovation makes it possible for developers to experiment, learn, collaborate, and build on shared technology rather than starting from scratch.
For a project like TouchGrass AI, open-source tools could eventually make it possible to explore local AI inference, customize recommendation behavior, and improve privacy without relying entirely on a closed, proprietary AI API.
It also makes the project easier for other developers to inspect, improve, and extend with ideas such as offline support, nature exploration challenges, garden planning, or bird-call identification.
I believe useful technology should not only be powerful; it should also be accessible, understandable, and open to improvement.
My goal is to build technology that encourages people to experience more of the world beyond their screens.
My Agent Session
Agent session: Not included in this submission yet.
I plan to document future AI-assisted development sessions as the project evolves toward open-weight AI integration.
Prize Categories
This project is submitted for Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass.
Additional partner prize categories may apply once the project meets their specific requirements. The current version does not claim integration with any particular AI partner or framework.
🌍 Final Thought
We build technology to improve our lives. Sometimes, that means building something that encourages us to put our phones down.
TouchGrass AI — Discover your next adventure. Then go live it. 🌿
Built by Devansh Gupta.
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