Star Runner AI: Caminar por la plaza para recoger dulces estrellas

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

What I Built

Star Runner AI is an interactive, privacy-first web application designed to gamify outdoor exploration. The app encourages users to "touch grass" by turning real-world public spaces, parks, and squares into custom interactive Arenas.
Users input the name of a local green space (optimized for Córdoba, Argentina, such as Plaza San Martín, Parque Sarmiento, or Plaza España). An on-device Small Language Model (SLM) processes the natural language input to identify the landmark, crosses it with geocoding boundaries, and projects interactive "stars" onto the physical perimeter of the park. To collect the stars and clear the mission, users must switch on "Real Mode" and walk to those physical coordinate boundaries using their device's GPS.

Demo

matiasdelcarpio-prog.github.io

Note: Designed primarily for mobile web browsers to be used live on-location.

Code

matiasdelcarpio-prog / star-runner-ai

A privacy-first, on-device AI web app that gamifies outdoor exploration by turning real-world parks into interactive star-collecting arenas using local LLM inference. Built for Hacktoberfest 2026.

How I Built It

The website waits for the model to finish downloading locally, and then asks it to parse the text you give it into the location of the park you meant. Afterwards, it feeds it into nominatim to get the location and generates a text that is meant to motivate you into collecting the stars. As for which model was used, it was Xenova/Qwen1.5-0.5B-Chat to be able to download it locally without any issues in the user's device and to avoid anything that has to do with having an internet connection, since it's meant for use in phones.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

The main reason that Open Innovation matters for this project is because you are running the model locally in your device. The main benefit is that it lets you keep total privacy when allowing use of your location to track whether you have collected the stars or not when using real mode. In addition, because the website does not use a private API, it allows you to use it as many times as you want to cost-free. Doubly additionally, because you download the model, if you stop having internet access while using the website you can keep using it for as long as you like! (as long as you don't reload the page)