Fly Brain vs FLY

A fruit fly, with its brain on show. Watch its nervous system light up in real time as it sees through your camera, listens through your microphone and responds to touch and motion. What it senses • Wave a hand or finger in front of the camera and its optic lobes light up, each eye from its own side. • Talk, clap or play music and the hearing centre in its brain flares up. • Turn your phone and its balance organs light up. • Tap one of its legs and a signal runs up that leg's own nerve. Tap its body and it shudders. How it behaves • Talk to it, or make a loud noise, and its wings buzz. • Show it a strong colour, like a piece of fruit, and it sets off walking. • Move something suddenly in front of the camera and it freezes with caution. • Bring something quickly towards the camera and it gets frightened and tries to escape. • Leave it alone for a while and it stops to clean itself. Inside its head The brain is built from real measurements: 34 regions in their measured shapes, drawn in over 3,000 points of light, and more than 500 real neurons traced from electron microscope images, each along its own path. Open the brain view to see 12 regions named, then pinch right in until the lobula plate splits into its four layers. The shapes and the neurons are real. The activity is illustrated, not recorded. On your table Tap AR to put the fly in your room. Pinch it from 5 cm to 20 m long and walk all the way around it. Make it yours Pick from eight skins, or go see-through and watch the brain light up inside the head. Private The camera and microphone are optional, and nothing they pick up is recorded, stored or sent anywhere. No ads, no accounts. Brain region shapes and neurons are based on public data from Janelia's FlyEM project and the Male CNS team (HHMI Janelia, the University of Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Google Research), used under CC BY 4.0. Fly Brain is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.

A pet fruit fly driven by a model of its real brain. FLY runs a whole-brain model of Drosophila in real time on your phone: 138,639 neurons and 15 million connections from the FlyWire connectome, mapped with an electron microscope. When you drop sugar in the terrarium, touch the antennae or cast a shadow, the stimulus travels through the fly's actual wiring, and that decides whether it feeds, grooms or escapes. • 3D glass terrarium with a fly based on the NeuroMechFly model, walking with a real fly's step cycle • Live brain map: see which neurons are firing right now • Hunger, thirst, hormones and sleep: a hungry fly is more sensitive to sugar and sleeps at night • Your fly keeps living when the app is closed and lets you know when it gets hungry • Lab: watch the firing rates of the neurons behind feeding, grooming and escape Honestly: this is a scientific model, not an uploaded fly. The wiring is real, the neurons are simplified. Hunger, hormones, sleep and walking are simplified models based on the literature. The Science & Licenses screen explains what is what. Free, no ads, no tracking, no account. Data: FlyWire (Dorkenwald et al. 2024, Schlegel et al. 2024), brain model by Shiu et al. 2024, body from NeuroMechFly (Wang-Chen et al. 2024).