FLYBOX

Explore a fruit-fly connectome inside a living sandbox

19 followers

Explore a fruit-fly connectome inside a living sandbox

19 followers

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Engineering & Development

FlyBox is an open-source interactive sandbox built around a simulated fruit-fly connectome with 166,700 neurons and ~25.6M synapses. Give the fly food, predators, obstacles, light and other stimuli, then watch its neural activity and behavior change in real time. Stimulate or silence neural populations, lesion connections, fork experiments, compare brains and inspect what the fly is doing as it happens.

Free

Launch tags:Open Source•Developer Tools•Artificial Intelligence

Launch Team / Built With

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Vercel

Vercel Day

Which Vercel product did you use? What new capability did it give your team, and how did that shape the product you launched?

FLYBOX

Maker

FlyBox uses Vercel for hosting, deployment, and analytics. The biggest capability it gave me was being able to ship a browser-based connectome sandbox quickly without having to manage traditional infrastructure for the frontend. That mattered because the actual simulation runs on the user’s own CPU/GPU in the browser, while Vercel handles delivering the app reliably and globally. This architecture let me keep the product lightweight, avoid server-side compute for the simulation itself, iterate quickly through frequent deployments, and focus on the interactive neuroscience experience rather than infrastructure.

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1mo ago

FLYBOX

Maker

📌

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.

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2mo ago

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