A Game That Replaces Doomscrolling, Powered by Local AI (Ollama)

Description and use

Field Dex turns a photo walk into a card‑pack opening game that rewards outdoor exploration with rarity, XP, gear, and a story, replacing endless scrolling with real‑world engagement.

Problem

Users often doomscroll instead of going outside, leading to wasted time and missed real-world experiences.

Outcome

Field Dex turns a simple photo walk into a gamified experience that rewards outdoor exploration with rare cards, XP, gear, and an evolving story, effectively replacing doomscrolling with real‑world engagement.

Workflow

• 1. Take photos of living things with the iPhone camera (no app needed).
• 2. Connect the iPhone to the laptop via Personal Hotspot and open Field Dex in Safari.
• 3. Upload today’s photos to the laptop; the local vision model (qwen2.5vl:3b) identifies each photo and assigns a rarity roll.
• 4. The text model (qwen2.5:3b) generates card flavour text, XP, gear unlocks, and a daily Wanted poster.
• 5. Reveal the card pack; XP and Dex updates appear only after flipping cards.
• 6. Read the story chapter that ends on a cliffhanger, motivating the next day’s walk.

Evidence

Field Dex is a pixel‑art creature‑collecting game where the creatures are real. You photograph a bird, a tree, a beetle or a flower on your normal iPhone camera, and when you get home you open the day's photos like a pack of trading cards.

Source

Everything runs on your own laptop through Ollama. No accounts, no cloud, no API keys. Your photos never leave your devices.

Source

The whole thing runs on a laptop with an RTX 3050 with 4 GB of VRAM. Identifying a photo takes roughly 6–9 seconds, and a batch of six photos, with their cards and the story chapter, finished in about 90 seconds.

Source