DesktopFly: A Drosophila with a Real Connectome Lives on the macOS...

DesktopFly: A Drosophila with a Real Connectome Lives on the macOS Desktop

A developer (GitHub: DenisSergeevitch) released the open-source project DesktopFly — a 3D drosophila for macOS whose "brain" is a 1 kHz simulation of 668 real neurons with ~19,000 synapses extracted from the FlyWire connectome (FAFB v783, 139,255 neurons).

Compiled by Sergey KostenchukPublished 2026-08-18Updated 2026-09-18

2026-08-18 Multimodal

🪰 DesktopFly: A Drosophila with a Real Connectome Lives on the macOS Desktop

A developer (GitHub: DenisSergeevitch) released DesktopFly — a 3D drosophila living on the macOS desktop (macOS 13+). Its "brain" is a 1 kHz simulation of 668 real neurons with ~19,000 synapses extracted from the FlyWire connectome (FAFB v783, 139,255 neurons).

🌍 A public connectome becomes executable software: FAFB v783 data (Dorkenwald et al., 2024, Nature) is fed into a spiking simulation that controls the behavior of a 3D model — a bridge between connectomics and neuromorphic modeling.

👤 On macOS 13+, after git clone and ./build.sh, you can raise a fly that takes off from a quick cursor movement (reaction ~4 ms), and in the brain window, you can "optogenetically" stimulate specific neurons with a click: Giant Fiber makes it run away, DNg11 — it scratches.

Source 1: https://github.com/DenisSergeevitch/desktop-fly Source 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49353221

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