A 3D fruit fly on your macOS desktop, powered by the real FlyWire connectome
A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
DesktopFly brings a 3D fruit fly to life on your Mac desktop, driven by a live spiking simulation of the real FlyWire connectome. The fly walks across windows, grooms, sleeps, and flees your cursor using the same neurons as a real fly. It features a brain window showing 23,210 real neuron positions with live spikes, and a 668-neuron circuit with ~19,000 real synapses. Escape is not scripted—your cursor's approach triggers the Giant Fiber neuron through real synaptic pathways. The project is open source (MIT) with data under CC BY-NC 4.0.
Escape is not scripted. Your cursor's approach becomes looming input to the real LC4/LPLC2 cells; the fly takes off only when the Giant Fiber actually spikes through its real synapses.