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. 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.
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.
1. Dashboard and quest preferences
2. Generated outdoor quest
3. Reflection and progress
Explore the code and setup instructions:
https://github.com/NirajDN/TouchGrass-Quest 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!