Quest Discovery: Reimagining Digital Exploration

I’m building a virtual geocaching app that keeps you in the moment instead of glued to your phone. It uses AI and image recognition for verification instead of text-based quizzes or QR codes, and it’s designed from the ground up with smart glasses support in mind.

Introducing project codename: Quest Discovery.

The Vision

If you read my blog post on virtual geocaching, you know I’m passionate about the idea of making location-based exploration more immersive. Traditional geocaching is alright, but it has problems: too much phone time, physical cache management, and lack of social features.

I can make it cool.

Quest Discovery solves these problems with digital quests verified by AI image recognition, seamless social integration, and a mobile experience built with smart glasses support in mind.

Core Experience

Getting Started

The onboarding needs to be simple. When you first open the app, you’ll go through a tutorial quest that asks you to photograph something everyone has – like a pair of shoes. Sounds silly, but it demonstrates the full quest experience without requiring users to travel anywhere.

Finding Quests

The Quest Discovery Page is where exploration begins. You can browse quests using an interactive slippy map, zooming and panning to find caches near you. Or if you prefer a list view, that’s available too.

Filter by location, difficulty, or whether it’s an official or community-created quest. When you find something interesting, tap it to see the full quest details.

Quest Pages

Each quest gets its own dedicated page showing:

Description and context about what you’re looking for
Whether it’s official or community-created (with creator attribution)
Location on the map and difficulty rating
Number of completions and recent completers
Sample photos (at least for official quests)

You can save quests to your library – organized into custom lists if you want – or jump right in and start the quest.

There’s room to add educational content here too. Historical context about landmarks, local business info, cultural significance. But that stays on the quest page only. When you enter Quest Mode, all that falls away.

Quest Mode

When you start a quest, the app enters Quest Mode – a focused interface that shows you only what you need to complete the quest.

The usual navigation options? Gone. Timeline, profile, discovery page – all hidden. You get the quest description, the location, and a camera button. That’s it.

When you think you’ve found the object, you take a photo. The app uses AI image recognition to verify it. If not successful, you can highlight the object in your photo to help the AI, retake the picture, or submit a description for manual review.

Eventually, I want to support live AI verification where you can point your camera (or glasses) at objects and get real-time feedback. That’s more complex and expensive to run, but the app architecture should support it down the line.

Quests stay in your Active Quests list for several days. If you don’t complete them in that timeframe, they move to “Idle” status. One button clears all idle quests if you want to clean house.

Timeline

The app opens to a Timeline – think X or TikTok with “For You” and “Following” feeds. See quest completions from your friends or discover what people are completing nearby. Like, comment, repost, share. Standard social features, but built around exploration and discovery.

When you complete a quest, you can add a caption (“Just completed a fun quest in City Park!”) and it posts to your timeline. You control whether this happens automatically or manually.

Player Profiles

Your profile shows your quest history, achievement stats, and rating. Other players can follow you – and if you follow each other back, you become friends.

Saved quests are private, organized into lists you create. But your completions are public by default, with flexible privacy controls:

Public - Everyone can see your timeline and completed quests
Friends Only - Only friends see your specific completions
Private - Even friends can’t see quest details, just your total points
Totally Private - Single-player mode. No leaderboards, no profile discovery

Connect Facebook, Instagram, X, or TikTok to:

Find friends who also use the app
Share quest completions to those platforms
Earn Herald Points (separate leaderboard for social sharing)

Different platforms offer different features. Facebook and Instagram let you discover mutual connections on the app. X and TikTok focus more on sharing completed quests. Each platform integration is its own thing.

Achievements and Progression

I’m taking inspiration from Old School Runescape’s tiered achievement system here. Multiple point categories, multiple leaderboards, and a grand total that encompasses everything.

Official Quest Points - Earned by completing developer-created or verified community quests. Tiered by difficulty, with harder quests awarding more points.

Community Quest Points - For completing any community-submitted quest, even ones that haven’t gone through the rigorous official verification process.

Trailblazer Points - Reward players for creating quality quests. You don’t get points immediately when you submit – the quest needs to pass quality checks first. Submit enough detail for official verification (multiple photos, quality descriptions, context) and you get bonus points.

Herald Points - Separate leaderboard for sharing quests on social platforms. This doesn’t factor into your main rating since not everyone wants to be social.

Achievements are public by default – other players can see your stats and completed quests – but you can override this with privacy settings.

Quest Creation

Premium users can submit their own quests. You pin a location on the map (pulled from your current location or from photo metadata), which ensures people only create quests in places they’ve actually visited.

Community quests go through screening. Basic community quests have lighter checks. But if you want your quest promoted to official status, you need to provide professional-quality descriptions, multiple photos of the target object, and context about what makes it interesting.

This is how we maintain quality while empowering the community to expand the quest catalog.

Authentication and Accounts

You should be able to sign in however you want. Facebook authentication makes sense given the Meta ecosystem focus, but Google, Apple, and Microsoft should be available options as well.

That said, not everyone wants their geocaching tied to their social accounts. So standalone app-managed accounts are equally important.

Smart Glasses Integration

The Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit isn’t fully released yet, so I’m building mobile-first with smart glasses support designed in from the start. When you connect your Meta AI glasses, you unlock:

Voice commands to have AI read quest descriptions aloud
Snap photos with your glasses and auto-submit for verification
Audio confirmation of quest success or failure

The goal is to eventually let you complete quests without pulling out your phone at all. Minimal display UI, voice interaction, and eyes-up exploration.

Premium vs Free

Free Tier - Complete unlimited quests. View social feeds. Earn points and climb leaderboards. Ads appear across the app in unobtrusive places.

Premium Tier - Everything in Free, plus quest creation, additional profile customization, and no ads. Monthly subscriptions and longer-term plans with discounted pricing.

Built for the Real World

Offline Support

It’s a big world out there… and cell service can be spotty in the wild. The app handles low-connectivity gracefully:

Pre-download quest data for saved quests and nearby regions
GPS-only verification without internet
Local photo storage with delayed submission
Background sync when connectivity returns

Clear indicators show online/offline status, and you can manually download quest packs before venturing into dead zones.

Safety First

Location-based apps need to take user safety seriously:

Warnings for quests near traffic, water, or restricted areas
Emergency contact integration and panic button functionality
Quest submission guidelines prohibiting dangerous locations
Community reporting for unsafe quests
Legal disclaimers and terms prohibiting trespassing

Privacy matters too. Location data gets encrypted, with limited retention policies. You can obscure your home/work locations in social features and complete quests anonymously if you want.

Accessibility

The app should work for everyone:

Screen reader support and high contrast modes
Audio descriptions and voice navigation
Haptic feedback options
Large touch targets and one-handed operation
Simplified UI modes for cognitive accessibility

Content Moderation

With user-generated content and social features, moderation is critical:

Automated review of posts and comments for hateful/harmful/illegal content
User reporting for quest posts and comments
Content filtering based on user age
Community guidelines and zero-tolerance harassment policies

Notifications

Push notifications for:

Recommended quests near your location
Friends completing quests (“Jerry Garcia, Tom Malone, and others recently completed quests”)
Social interactions (likes, comments, follows)

All configurable, of course. Some people want every notification, some people want none.

Final Thoughts

Games like Pokemon GO proved there’s massive demand for location-based experiences. But nothing out there combines AI verification, smart glasses integration, and a social exploration platform.

I’m building this mobile-first for Android and iPhone. The future is hands-free, and Quest Discovery is designed for it.

🤘 This post will feed directly into my requirements specification – pretty efficient, eh?