A housefly that lives on your screen, run by the real FlyWire connectome of an adult fruit fly brain: 139,255 neurons, 3.87M connections, simulated as a leaky integrate-and-fire network after Shiu et al. 2024.
The fly on this page is a recording. Its brain was simulated once, offline, over this exact desktop; the page replays the trajectory and the spike trains it produced. Nothing is simulated in your browser. The window on the right shows what its neurons were doing at every moment: escape, walking, steering, grooming and feeding commands, and the optic lobe watching the cursor.
The desktop is its world: window edges are lines of trees it perches on, the cursor is a dark mound of earth that prowls its meadow. Watch the LC4/LPLC2 rows in the raster when the mound moves; a strong enough looming burst reaches the giant fiber and the fly escapes.
Run the live one from github.com/JoshKappler/deskfly.
Connectome: FlyWire public release 783 (CC BY-NC 4.0), Dorkenwald et al. 2024; annotations Schlegel et al. 2024; model constants Shiu et al. 2024. Side-view fly photo: Elena Regina (CC BY-SA 4.0).