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.
- causal
I appreciate the open source approach over the startup's sensational claims. This is more transparent.
That said, I think it still presents itself as if the fly is being controlled by the connectome, when (if I'm reading the source correctly) it's more accurate to say scripted behaviors have been hooked up to be triggered by the connectome.
Put another way, you might as well have the "escape" trigger open a YouTube video of a fly flying away. That would probably be less misleading too.
- DaiPlusPlus
I have no exposure to connectomes - or really anything quite like this (as opposed to good ol’ fashioned perceptrons) - so forgive my following uninformed question:
Can someone explain if this software is ethical?
- a1o
> What's modeled vs. measured
> Honesty section:
I wouldn’t mind an human written README
- jochak
quite interesting, very small neural nets mimicking the brain of a fruit fly
- aperrien
Interesting work! There's NeuroMechFly (https://github.com/NeLy-EPFL/flygym/) available, you might try using that to simulate the fly body in real time as well.
- pavel_lishin
Ah, Mr. Acevedo, nice to see you.
- neuraldenis
Hi, im the author of this repo, thank you for posting here!
- qingcharles
At some point in the future would it be possible to simply download a DNA sequence of an entire animal as a "ROM" and boot it into a virtual "reality"?
What detail level of reality would we have to emulate for an egg to grow into an adult animal?