Touch Grass Bingo: Nature Exploration Powered by OpenCLIP & Render

Description and use

Touch Grass Bingo uses OpenCLIP for instant verification of nature photos, limiting screen time to 5 seconds per item and encouraging outdoor activity.

Problem

Modern developers spend excessive time on screens; need a short outdoor incentive.

Outcome

The app delivers a daily nature bingo card, uses zero‑shot OpenCLIP verification, and keeps total screen time minimal, encouraging outdoor exploration.

Workflow

• Open mobile web app to view daily 3×3 bingo card seeded by date
• Locate an item in the environment and capture a photo with the phone camera
• Compress photo to 512 px max dimension and send to self‑hosted Render container
• Render runs FastAPI with a single Uvicorn worker on PyTorch CPU, loads OpenCLIP ViT‑B‑32
• OpenCLIP encodes image and target/distractor prompts, computes cosine similarity, applies threshold
• If verified, tile turns green and progress is stored in browser localStorage
• Repeat until 3 in a row for BINGO or full card for Garden Master

Evidence

Touch Grass Bingo is a mobile‑first web app that generates a daily 3x3 nature bingo card seeded deterministically by the current calendar date.

Source

The client compresses the photo and sends it to our self‑hosted OpenCLIP vision model on Render. The model performs zero‑shot image‑text verification against target prompts and distractors.

Source

Total screen time is roughly 5 seconds per item; the rest of the time is spent observing the natural world.

Source