GoKawiilDesktopFly 🪰
A 3D fruit fly that lives on your macOS desktop — driven by a live spiking simulation of the real FlyWire connectome. It walks across your windows, grooms, sleeps, and decides to flee your cursor with the same neurons a real fly uses.
The fly's brain window: 23,210 real neuron soma positions from FlyWire v783, with live spikes flashing at real neuron locations. The two glowing yellow markers are the Giant Fibers — the escape command neurons. Click any region to stimulate it.
What's real
23,210 neuron soma positions (of 139,255 in FlyWire v783) render the rotating brain window, colored by super-class (FlyWire's coarse cell-type grouping).
(of 139,255 in FlyWire v783) render the rotating brain window, colored by super-class (FlyWire's coarse cell-type grouping). A 668-neuron circuit with ~19,000 real synaptic connections (synapse counts, signed by neurotransmitter prediction) runs as a 1 kHz leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) simulation: LC4 (104) + LPLC2 (210) looming-detector visual neurons DNp01 / Giant Fiber (GF) (2) — the escape command neuron DNa01 + DNa02 (4) steering neurons · DNp09 (2) forward walking DNg11 (6) grooming · MDN (4) backward walking ("moonwalker") DNp02/DNp04/DNp11 (6) escape-maneuver (wing) neurons their 330 strongest partners, including ascending (proprioceptive) and sensory (wind) neurons
(synapse counts, signed by neurotransmitter prediction) runs as a 1 kHz leaky-integrate-and-fire (LIF) simulation: Escape is not scripted. Your cursor's approach becomes looming input to the real LC4/LPLC2 cells; the fly takes off only when the Giant Fiber actually spikes through its real synapses — ~1,200 synapses of feedforward inhibition push back, which is why slow approaches are tolerated and fast lunges trigger escape in ~4 ms, just like the real animal.
The body itself is procedural (FlyWire is a brain connectome — no body geometry exists), with a tripod gait, visible wing-beat, altitude-scaled flight, grooming, and sleep postures.
Installation
Requirements: macOS 13+, Xcode Command Line Tools (Swift 5.9+). No permissions or entitlements needed — everything it senses (cursor, window frames, clicks-as-taps, thermal state) is permission-free.
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