What if exploring the real world had its own score?
Not a score for how many hours you spend online, how many posts you publish, or how many followers you gain — but one that grows when you actually go somewhere, discover a new place, and experience it with other people.
That's the idea behind Grounded, an open-source project I'm building to encourage real-world exploration through live check-ins, place discovery, and social exploration scores.
The concept is simple: go somewhere, share a live photo from your visit, and build your exploration score. Discovering a new place, returning to a familiar one, and exploring with friends can all contribute to your journey.
🌍 The idea behind Grounded
Most social platforms reward digital activity. Grounded is designed around activity in the physical world.
Imagine visiting a café you've never been to before. You check in by capturing a live photo at the location, and your exploration score increases. Later, you visit another new place, perhaps a bookshop or a park, and your score grows again.
Eventually, you return to that first café. Revisiting places is part of the experience too, because discovering a place once doesn't mean you've experienced everything it has to offer.
Now imagine going with friends. The experience becomes social, and exploring together can contribute an additional score bonus based on the number of people participating.
Grounded turns ordinary outings into a record of the places you've actually experienced.
📍 How Grounded works
1. Discover a new place
Find somewhere you haven't visited before: a café, restaurant, bookstore, park, local attraction, or another interesting destination.
The goal is to make discovering unfamiliar places feel rewarding and encourage people to step outside their usual routines.
2. Visit and post a live photo
When you arrive, capture and submit a live photo as proof of your visit.
The intention is to make check-ins reflect real-world experiences rather than simply allowing users to upload old photos from their galleries. Location and photo verification will need to be implemented carefully to discourage fake check-ins.
3. Increase your exploration score
Your score grows as you explore.
The scoring system is intended to distinguish between discovering a new place, revisiting somewhere you've already been, and participating in a shared outing.
New discoveries should be particularly meaningful because the goal is to encourage people to expand their world, rather than repeatedly visiting the same place just to accumulate points.
4. Revisit places
Grounded isn't only about collecting new locations.
Returning to a favourite café, revisiting a park, or taking friends somewhere you've discovered before should also count towards your exploration journey.
The scoring rules can reward repeat visits while ensuring that repeated check-ins at one location don't overshadow genuine discovery.
5. Explore with more people
Exploration becomes more interesting when it's shared.
Grounded's planned group-scoring feature gives users additional credit for visiting places with other people. The number of participants can influence the score, rewarding outings that bring people together.
For example, an outing with three friends could earn a group bonus compared with visiting alone. The exact scoring formula is something I'll refine as the prototype develops.
The aim is to make discovering places a social activity, not just an individual competition.
🏆 What makes the scoring system interesting?
Grounded can eventually track more than a single total.
- Discovery score: progress from visiting places for the first time.
- Return score: progress from revisiting previously discovered locations.
- Social score: progress from exploring with other people.
- Exploration history: a record of the places you've visited and the experiences you've collected.
These are proposed scoring categories, not all implemented features yet.
Together, they could make a user's profile represent their real-world exploration rather than their online popularity.
🤖 Where open-weight AI fits in
I also want to explore how open-weight AI can make Grounded more useful.
Using Gemma, Google's family of open-weight models, the future version could help users decide where to go based on their interests, available time, budget, and preferred type of outing.
For example, someone could ask:
“I have two hours free, want to spend less than ₹300, and would like to explore somewhere new with friends.”
The AI could help generate an adventure plan with suitable activities and a suggested sequence of stops, using reliable destination information when available.
AI would help people discover their next experience. The live check-in and scoring system would record their real-world exploration.
Current status: Gemma integration is planned, not yet implemented. The current backend has a working health-check endpoint and a template-based adventure API.
🛠️ How I'm building it
I'm starting with a backend using Node.js and Express.
The current prototype includes:
- A health-check endpoint to confirm that the backend is running.
- An adventure endpoint that accepts interests, available time, and an optional budget.
- A structured response containing a basic adventure recommendation.
The next development steps are to connect the frontend, integrate Gemma, add real destination data, and implement persistent visit records and the exploration-scoring system.
Live photo capture, location verification, group scoring, and a deployed public demo remain future work.
🔐 Making check-ins meaningful
Because Grounded's score depends on real-world visits, trust matters.
As I develop the check-in system, I want to explore:
- Location checks to help establish that a user is near the destination.
- Fresh photo capture rather than unrestricted gallery uploads.
- Duplicate-check-in prevention and reasonable limits on repeat rewards.
- Consent-based handling of location and photo data.
- Transparent scoring rules so users understand how their score changes.
Location and photo checks can reduce abuse, although neither alone guarantees that a visit is genuine.
💚 Why build Grounded?
I want to explore a different way of using technology to encourage offline activity.
Instead of rewarding people only for what they do on a screen, Grounded aims to reward the places they discover, the experiences they collect, and the people they explore with.
A new café becomes more than a location on a map. It becomes a discovery. Returning to a favourite place becomes part of your history. Going somewhere with friends becomes an experience you can share.
The bigger vision is a platform where your exploration score grows as your real-world experiences grow.
Don't just scroll through the world. Go explore it.
🔗 Project
GitHub: https://github.com/PragyaTandi/grounded-ai
Grounded is an early-stage open-source prototype, and I'm building towards this vision one feature at a time. Feedback, ideas, and contributions are welcome.
Team Submissions : @nazya_2345
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