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NAITIK AGARWAL
NAITIK AGARWAL

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Touch Grass, Week 1 Dev Challenge hacktoberfest 26

#devchallenge #hf26challenge #hacktoberfest #ai

Hacktoberfest: Contribution Chronicles

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

What I Built

TouchGrass is a web app that uses AI to turn screen time into a reason to go outside.

Instead of endlessly scrolling, you get a small outdoor challenge — like finding a natural pattern, capturing a leaf, or observing something in the sky. You complete it using your camera, and AI checks whether your outdoor evidence matches the challenge.

The app tracks both your current session time and the time spent completing the challenge, encouraging you to actually step away from the screen and interact with the world around you.

It’s designed for anyone who wants a simple push to get outside without turning it into another social or productivity app.

Demo

Live Demo:

touchgrassai.vercel.app

Code

GitHub:

GitHub logo Naitik-xd / Week-1-Dev-Challenge

Hacktoberfest 26

TouchGrass

An anti-screen habit application built for Hacktoberfest 2026 Week 1 ("Touch Grass"). TouchGrass assigns micro outdoor observation challenges, encourages you to physically step away from your device into nature, and verifies your findings through live camera evidence.

AI Architecture

TouchGrass is powered strictly and exclusively by Google's open-weight Gemma 4 models via the @google/genai SDK:

  • Primary Model: gemma-4-26b-a4b-it
  • Fallback Model: gemma-4-31b-it

Functions Handled by Gemma 4:

  1. Dynamic Challenge Generation (POST /api/challenge): Synthesizes safe, achievable outdoor observation tasks across 13+ varied themes with randomized seeds to prevent repetition.
  2. Multimodal Vision Verification (POST /api/validate): Analyzes camera-captured snapshots against the active assignment criteria and delivers constructive feedback.

Core Features

  • Interactive 3D Terra Biosphere: Three.js WebGL centerpiece on the hero page with cursor-reactive rotation and floating atmospheric particles.
  • Strictly Camera-Only Shutter: Evidence capture invokes the device hardware photo camera directly (capture="environment"…
View on GitHub

How I Built It

TouchGrass is built with React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Vercel, and Gemma.

Gemma is used to generate outdoor challenges and analyze camera-captured evidence to determine whether it reasonably matches the assigned task.

The app uses a server-side API route to keep the AI API key out of the client, while session and timer state are persisted locally so refreshing the page doesn't reset an active challenge.

There’s no login, database, or social feed — the focus is simply:

Get a challenge → Go outside → Capture evidence → Complete it.

## Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation makes it possible to build experiences where AI is not just another chatbot sitting inside a screen.

With open-weight AI models like Gemma, developers can experiment with AI as part of real-world interactions — in this case, using AI to encourage people to leave the screen and engage with their physical environment.

That flexibility makes it easier to build small, focused ideas around AI without needing to turn everything into another closed, screen-first experience.

## Prize Categories

  • Gemma

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