🌿 WildTrail

Most modern applications are engineered to keep you staring down at glass screens. WildTrail does the exact opposite: it turns your walk through a neighborhood park, forest reserve, or mountain trail into an immersive botanical expedition.

Identify wildlife in real time using open neural models running directly inside your browser. Mint vintage, tactile 3D specimen stamps for every creature or wildflower you encounter. Watch the RPG-style fog-of-war lift as you physically hike outdoors. And navigate remote wilderness without cellular coverage using genuine, local PMTiles vector maps.

flowchart LR
    A["🌿 1. Step Outdoors"] --> B["📷 2. Point Camera"]
    B --> C["🧠 3. On-Device AI"]
    C --> D["🏷️ 4. Confirm Species"]
    D --> E["📖 5. Mint 3D Stamp"]
    E --> F["🗺️ 6. Uncover Fog-of-War"]
    F --> A

Point your camera at any bird, flower, insect, or animal. The vision pipeline runs directly inside your device's browser runtime using WebGPU and WebAssembly. No photos are ever uploaded to cloud servers.

_{Instant species suggestions with confidence scoring, hardware lens switching, exact 1:1 framing parity, and a mechanical 35mm SLR shutter sound.}

Every confirmed observation is minted into a vintage postage stamp. Browse your personal herbarium across kingdoms (Animals, Birds, Plants, Insects), arrange finds by recency or name, and tilt cards to inspect scalloped edges and handwritten field notes.

_{Interactive specimen archive featuring multi-axis 3D tilt physics, card flips, and explorer XP progression.}

🐅 Animals Panthera tigris · 65 XP

🐧 Birds Alca torda · 55 XP

❄️ Polar Fauna Spheniscidae · 50 XP

🌸 Plants Euphorbia milii · 30 XP

Experience your neighborhood or backcountry trails like an RPG world map. Fog-of-war tiles conceal unexplored terrain until you physically hike through them in 20-meter cells. GPS pathfinding paints glowing trail breadcrumbs, calculates total distance walked, and places interactive discovery pins.

_{Dynamic fog-of-war, Google Maps-style dynamic flashlight vision cone, multi-touch rotation, and offline vector cartography.}

Export your wildlife discoveries as archival botanical collector postcards. Generated entirely on-device using HTML5 Canvas, each postcard combines high-resolution photography, scientific binomial taxonomy, discovery GPS coordinates, and vintage postmark cancellation stamps ready to share with friends.

WildTrail is engineered around a client-side architecture (the app has no backend servers):

flowchart TD
    subgraph Client["📱 User Device (Client-Side, No Backend Servers)"]
        UI["🌿 WildTrail PWA Shell (Vanilla ES6+ / CSS3)"]
        Vision["🧠 Transformers.js · CLIP ViT-B/32 (ONNX / WebGPU)"]
        Audio["🔊 Web Audio API (Dual-Resonance SLR Mechanical Shutter)"]
        GIS["🗺️ MapLibre GL JS + PMTiles v3 (Vector Tile Engine)"]
        Storage[("💾 IndexedDB: Finds · GPS Tracks · Offline Regions")]

        UI <--> Vision
        UI <--> Audio
        UI <--> GIS
        UI <--> Storage
    end

    subgraph Remote["🌐 Caches Once on Wi-Fi · Works Fully Offline Thereafter"]
        NoServer["❌ No Backend Application Servers"]
        NoDB["❌ No Cloud Databases"]
        NoTrack["❌ No Analytics, Accounts, or Tracking"]
    end

For deep backcountry expeditions without cell signal, WildTrail provides an end-to-end offline cartography pipeline:

flowchart LR
    A["⭐ Demo Pack\n(Taipei Botanical Reserve)"] --> B["⚡ Chunked ReadableStream\n(Real-Time Progress)"]
    B --> C["🔍 PMTiles v3 Header Check\n(Bounds & Format Validation)"]
    C --> D["💾 IndexedDB Persistence\n(Persistent Device Storage)"]
    D --> E["🌲 Offline MapLibre GL JS\n(Offline navigation with a downloaded pack)"]

• Default Online Basemap (OpenFreeMap): Powered by MapLibre GL JS and OpenFreeMap Liberty style (https://tiles.openfreemap.org/styles/liberty), highlighting forests, nature reserves, green spaces, waterways, and walking trails without API keys or commercial dependencies.
• 1-Click Wilderness Pack Downloader: Download self-contained wilderness maps (such as our demo pack: Taipei Botanical Reserve, ~300 m area, 6.7 MB — Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)) directly inside the app with real-time streaming progress bars (ReadableStream), no manual hunting for files, and automatic IndexedDB persistence.
• Dynamic Flashlight Vision Cone: Google Maps-style field of view beam that rotates smoothly in real-time with device compass orientation and GPS movement.
• Two-Finger Touch Rotation: Rotate map orientation freely with multi-touch gestures, with an interactive HUD button to snap North-up.
• Custom URL Downloader & Archive Inspector: Download any public, CORS-enabled .pmtiles archive by direct URL, or inspect geographic bounding boxes, zoom levels ($z0–z21$), and vector layer schemas.
• Offline Storage Management: Live storage quota meter calculates exact MB usage and available disk space (navigator.storage.estimate).

👉 Open WildTrail → https://wildtrail-chi.vercel.app

For the optimal outdoor experience, open the link in your mobile browser and install it to your home screen.

• iPhone / iPad: Open the site in Safari → tap Share (box with arrow) → tap "Add to Home Screen".
• Android: Open the site in Chrome → tap Menu (⋮) → tap "Install app" or "Add to Home screen".
• Desktop: Click the install icon in the URL bar (Chrome / Edge / Brave).

Camera and geolocation APIs require a secure origin (HTTPS or localhost):

# 1. Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/XiaoArnav/wildtrail.git
cd wildtrail

# 2. Start a local static server
python3 -m http.server 8000

Open http://localhost:8000 in your browser.

• On-device species identification with OpenAI CLIP (clip-vit-base-patch32).
• Vintage perforated 3D specimen stamps with physics tilt and card flips.
• GPS pathfinding with dynamic 20m fog-of-war unmasking.
• Replace CARTO API basemap with OpenFreeMap Liberty (no API keys required).
• Google Maps-style dynamic compass with rotating flashlight vision cone.
• Full offline vector & raster mapping powered by local .pmtiles archives.
• 1-Click in-app Wilderness Map Pack downloader with streaming progress.
• Vintage herbarium collector postcard export with postmark stamps.
• IndexedDB storage quota management and archive inspector.
• #1 — GPX 1.1 trail track export alongside JSON format (Implemented via GitHub Copilot PR #7)
• #2 — Expand offline species taxonomy catalogue for butterflies & wildflowers (Good first issue · Open for contributors)
• #3 — High-contrast mode for outdoor sunlight readability (Implemented via GitHub Copilot PR #6)
• Audio bird call identification using on-device acoustic models.

Contributions, bug reports, and ideas are warmly welcomed! WildTrail is an active open-source project participating in Hacktoberfest 2026.

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a feature branch: git checkout -b feat/your-improvement
3. Test your changes thoroughly across desktop and mobile browsers.
4. Submit a clear pull request with descriptions and UI screenshots.

Hacktoberfest Quality Standards: In alignment with official Hacktoberfest rules, contributions must add genuine value (e.g. bug fixes, new species classifications, accessibility improvements, or offline optimizations). Automated copy-paste PRs or trivial whitespace edits will not be accepted.

WildTrail is made possible by open-source libraries and open geographic data:

• Transformers.js by Xenova / Hugging Face
• MapLibre GL JS
• OpenFreeMap
• PMTiles by Protomaps
• Map vector data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
• Demo offline map pack (maps/taipei-botanical-reserve.pmtiles): Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)

Distributed under the MIT License. © 2026 Arnav Patel.