Flyiverse: a field guide to the fly brain’s strange internet life

A fly’s nervous system gets mapped by researchers. And somehow, someone looks at the wiring diagram and asks the eternal question - can it play Doom?

Then can it run Snake? Can it walk around your Mac desktop? What, exactly, is the “fly” in each of these projects?

I made Flyiverse to help myself understand the landscape, and also because these experiments were oddly hard to find in one place. Also it was a great opportunity to test out Astra’s visual design chops.

Flyiverse is a 101 to fruit flies and a field guide to the weird little projects built around fruit-fly connectomes: games, desktop pets, virtual bodies, art, scientific models, and the ports that grow around them. The first edition has 37 primary projects and six related ports.

Connectomes

A connectome is a map of which nerve cells connect. You can simulate with it. It does not come with a body, a visual system, a controller, or instructions for playing a game. Builders have to make choices about all of that: how game frames become signals, how simulated cells behave, and which signals turn into left, right, jump, or fire.

Take DOOMFLY. Its repository connects a retained MaleCNS wiring graph to a fixed set of Doom controls.

DesktopFly is another favorite. It puts a 3D fly on a desktop and describes modeled senses, joints, and behavior alongside FlyWire and MaleCNS wiring. The result is charming. It is also an engineered creature with explicit bridges between different data and body layers, not a reconstructed fly wandering around your windows.

The underlying work is extraordinary: the researchers, annotators, engineers, and communities behind FlyWire, MaleCNS, and related connectomics projects made this whole strange corner of the internet possible.

A few more fun projects in the same vein:

• FlyTris — a connectome-constrained mushroom body takes on Tetris.
• Fly64 — a MaleCNS model wired into Super Mario 64.
• Help the Fly Escape — rearrange a tiny house and see which simulated flies find the exit.
• FLY / MINE — Minesweeper logic repurposed through traced MaleCNS neurons.
• FLYBOARD — a whole fly CNS listens for the pulse inside pop songs.
• making-fly-play-chess — a frozen fly-connectome reservoir gives chess positions a strange second opinion.
• TalkingFly — an olfactory subgraph sniffs a molecule, then a local language model gives it a voice.

Here’s flyiverse