A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome
- ID
- 15739
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 19 Aug 2026, 5:50 AM
- Fetched
- 21 Aug 2026, 6:04 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://github.com/DenisSergeevitch/desktop-fly
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 21 Aug 2026, 7:09 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersvibe_coders
What happened
An open-source macOS desktop pet renders a 3D fruit fly whose behavior is driven by a live spiking simulation of 668 real neurons (~19,000 synaptic connections) from the FlyWire v783 connectome. Your cursor acts as looming input to real LC4/LPLC2 visual neurons; escape triggers only when the Giant Fiber actually spikes through its real synapses (~4 ms latency, matching real fly behavior). The body is procedural since FlyWire contains only brain data, not body geometry.
Why it matters
If you teach or learn computational neuroscience, this is a runnable, hackable Swift project showing how a real connectome maps to behavior—not a toy demo with scripted animations. Builders can fork it to explore how connectome data (FlyWire v783, 139,255 neurons total) translates into LIF simulations, and the codebase is small enough (a handful of Swift files plus an ETL script) to read in one sitting.
Discussion angle
What does it mean that only 668 of 139,255 neurons are simulated yet the fly's escape behavior is biologically plausible? Discuss the gap between full-connectome data and minimal-circuit simulation, and whether this approach could scale to other organisms or agent design.