🌿 TouchGrass Quest: Using Gemma AI to Help People Get Outdoors

A developer built TouchGrass Quest, an open-source AI-powered outdoor activity companion that generates structured quests with practical steps and sensory challenges based on a user's available time and preferred activity style. The project, created for the Hacktoberfest 2026 Open-Source AI Challenge, integrates open-weight Gemma inference with a fallback mode for when an AI provider is unavailable; local verification included a successful frontend production build, three passing backend tests, a backend health check, and browser testing of the main quest and reflection workflow, though live Gemma inference has not yet been verified.

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 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