For the Hacktoberfest 2026 Open-Source AI Challenge — Week 1, “Touch Grass,” I built TouchGrass Quest, an AI-powered outdoor activity companion designed to help people take a break from screens and spend more intentional time outdoors.
💡 The idea
It's easy to spend hours looking at screens without making time to explore the world around us. TouchGrass Quest turns a simple outdoor break into a small, structured adventure.
Users can choose their available time and preferred activity style, then generate an outdoor quest with practical steps and sensory challenges.
🌱 Features
- Outdoor quest generation: Create missions for parks, gardens, or neighborhood walks.
- Screen-Light Mode: Follow your mission while spending less time looking at your phone.
- Focus timer: Stay engaged with your outdoor activity.
- Reflection journal: Record observations and reflect on the experience.
- Progress tracking: Save completed quests, reflections, and in-app achievements.
- Gemma integration: The backend supports hosted inference with Gemma models through configured providers, with a fallback generator when live AI inference is unavailable.
🛠️ Technology stack
- React and Vite
- Node.js and Express
- Google Gemma model integration
- JavaScript, HTML, and CSS
- LocalStorage for browser-side progress persistence
🧪 Testing
The reported local verification results include a successful frontend production build, three passing backend tests, a successful backend health check, and browser testing of the main quest and reflection workflow.
Live Gemma inference has not yet been verified; the fallback mode has been tested.
📸 Screenshots
1. Dashboard and quest preferences
2. Generated outdoor quest
3. Reflection and progress
🔗 Project repository
Explore the code and setup instructions:
https://github.com/NirajDN/TouchGrass-Quest
🌍 Why I built it
My goal was to make spending time outdoors feel approachable. Rather than asking people to make a huge lifestyle change, TouchGrass Quest encourages them to begin with one small mission: observe nature, explore their surroundings, and take a break from the screen.
Building this project also gave me an opportunity to explore integrating open-weight AI into a practical application while keeping the core experience usable when an AI provider is unavailable.
I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas for making outdoor exploration more engaging!
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