Hey Product Hunt, I built FlyBox, an open-source interactive sandbox around a simulated fruit-fly connectome with 166,700 neurons and roughly 25.6 million synapses. FlyBox builds on the Janelia/FlyEM MaleCNS connectome and the FlyBrain project. Huge credit to the researchers behind the MaleCNS dataset for making this possible. Instead of just visualizing a connectome, FlyBox puts it inside an interactive environment. You can add food, predators, obstacles, light and other stimuli, then watch the fly respond in real time. The simulation runs directly in your browser using your own CPU/GPU, so the actual simulation does not depend on server-side compute. You can also interact with the neural system itself by stimulating or silencing populations, lesioning connections, inspecting live neural activity, forking experiments and comparing different runs. FlyBox has two main modes: PLAY for interacting with the environment. LAB for inspecting and manipulating neural activity. This is an experimental sandbox, not a claim of fully reproducing fruit-fly biology. The goal is to make connectome-scale experimentation more interactive and accessible. The project is fully open source. I’d love feedback on the simulation, the interface, and what experiments you think would be worth adding next. The main changes are just removing a bit of repetition and making the CPU/GPU line cleaner. I’d post this version.

FLYBOX

Explore a fruit-fly connectome inside a living sandbox

Explore a fruit-fly connectome inside a living sandbox