Offscreen: Local AI That Gets You Off Your Phone and Outside
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass What I Built I built Offscreen , an open-source project that helps people spend less time scrolling and more time outside. The idea came from a simple problem: we spend hours on our phones, sometimes without even knowing what else to do. Offscreen gives you a reason to put the phone down. It suggests outdoor…
Title: Offscreen: AI That Keeps You Away From Your Phone and Engages You With Nature
This is a project for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass. The creator built Offscreen, an open-source initiative that encourages people to spend less time on their phones and more time outdoors. The project addresses the common problem of excessive phone usage, offering a solution in the form of suggested outdoor activities, timers, and a personal journal to track completed tasks.
Offscreen is available as an Android app and a browser version, both of which utilize local AI capabilities. Users can generate outdoor missions directly on their devices, rather than relying on a cloud-based AI API. The project includes a Streamlit prototype for additional experimentation.
The Android version relies on a native llama.cpp integration to load GGUF models, while the browser version uses WebLLM with WebGPU support on compatible devices. Ollama is employed for the prototype. Users are responsible for selecting an appropriate model that their device can manage, as larger models may exceed the available memory on some Android devices, causing the app to crash.
The project is still in development and serves as a solo effort by the creator, a student developer named @ouuwz. The open-source nature of Offscreen allows for community contribution, improvement of model compatibility, performance, accessibility, and overall user experience. The creator invites users to try the web app (https://ouuwz.github.io/OffScreen/) and GitHub repository (https://github.com/ouuwz/OffScreen), report any issues, and help enhance the project.
The demo includes interactive web pages showcasing the Offscreen interface: "A Little More Outside," "Plan Your Next Outdoor Mission," "A Private Nature Journal," "Track Your Progress," and "Local AI and Privacy Settings."
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