REALITY.EXE: Some Problems Can't Be Solved on a Screen 🌿

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

What I Built

REALITY.EXE is a scavenger-hunt-style game where the real world becomes the game environment.

Instead of navigating a fictional map or completing conventional digital quests, players receive challenges that encourage them to explore their surroundings, observe everyday objects, and find evidence in the physical world.

Here's how it works:

🎯 AI-generated missions: Players receive challenges containing objectives and clues.

🌎 Real-world exploration: Players must step away from their screens and search their physical environment for things that match the mission.

📸 Photo-based evidence: Players submit photographs of what they discover.

🤖 AI-powered analysis: A vision-language model analyses submitted images to help evaluate whether the evidence matches the challenge.

🏆 XP and progression: Completing challenges rewards experience points and advances player progression.

The game also includes a timer, hints, and a progression system to make exploration feel like a game rather than a checklist.

The central idea is simple: use AI to encourage people to interact with the physical world, not just generate more content for them to consume on a screen.

Demo

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13slxoySy0zVNZGcVZyhnaPa9PrEGQlEq/view?usp=sharing

Code

Gitcarbonath / REALITY.exe

An AI-powered real-world exploration game where some problems can't be solved on a screen.

REALITY.EXE — v0.1

A mobile-first PWA concept for Hacktoberfest 2026 "Touch Grass".

Core loop

1. Configure a case.
2. Open-source AI generates the mystery.
3. Put the phone away and explore the real world.
4. Photograph evidence.
5. Vision AI verifies it.
6. Solve the case or receive a new clue.

Run locally

Backend

cd backend
python -m venv .venv
.venv\\Scripts\\Activate.ps1
pip install -r requirements.txt
uvicorn app.main:app --reload

Frontend

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

Open the Vite URL on your computer. For phone testing on the same Wi-Fi, run Vite with npm run dev -- --host and set VITE_API_URL to the computer's LAN URL before starting the frontend.

The backend currently uses Ollama if available and has safe fallback cases for development. Default models are gemma3:4b for text and vision; change TEXT_MODEL and VISION_MODEL environment variables if needed.

View on GitHub

The project is open source, and the repository contains the application code and setup instructions.

The main technologies are:

Frontend: React + Vite
Backend: Python + FastAPI
AI inference: Ollama
AI model: Gemma 3 4B, used for text generation and vision tasks
Persistence: SQLite

The architecture keeps the frontend, backend, and local inference separate, making it possible to develop and test the application without relying on a paid cloud AI API.

How I Built It

Open innovation made this project possible without requiring a paid AI API.

Using an open-weight model through Ollama gave me the ability to experiment with AI-powered gameplay on my own hardware. I could iterate on prompts, test challenge generation, and experiment with image analysis without having every interaction depend on a paid external service.

It also gave me more control over the development environment and the way the model integrates with the application.

For an independent developer working with a zero-budget constraint, that freedom matters. It makes experimentation accessible and allows the focus to remain on the idea itself rather than the cost of every model request.

Open innovation also makes the project easier for other developers to inspect, learn from, modify, and extend.

I see REALITY.EXE as an experiment in a broader possibility: AI doesn't have to keep us inside digital environments. It can help us engage more meaningfully with the world outside them.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation made this project possible without requiring a paid AI API.

Using an open-weight model through Ollama gave me the ability to experiment with AI-powered gameplay on my own hardware. I could iterate on prompts, test challenge generation, and experiment with image analysis without having every interaction depend on a paid external service.

It also gave me more control over the development environment and the way the model integrates with the application.

For an independent developer working with a zero-budget constraint, that freedom matters. It makes experimentation accessible and allows the focus to remain on the idea itself rather than the cost of every model request.

Open innovation also makes the project easier for other developers to inspect, learn from, modify, and extend.

I see REALITY.EXE as an experiment in a broader possibility: AI doesn't have to keep us inside digital environments. It can help us engage more meaningfully with the world outside them.

Prize Categories

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

I am entering Best Use of Gemma.

Gemma 3 is the central AI component of REALITY.EXE. It runs locally through Ollama and is responsible for converting unstructured team updates into structured project events that drive the referee's analysis.