flylabs: the brain of the fruit fly, at work in machines

In 2024 the FlyWire consortium published the complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly’s brain: 138,639 connected neurons, 15.1 million connections and 54.5 million synapses. This brain contains motion detectors, a head-direction compass, detectors for approaching objects and the mushroom body, a learning centre best known for smells.

flylabs brings this brain into machines. We run it in software and let it drive a mouse pointer, an object tracker for video, a walking body and video games.

How

The wiring is never changed. The fly brain learns each task, and every demo runs it live in your browser.

What we ask

With every task we find out which of the fly’s circuits take on the job.

Status in September 2026

The fly brain moves a mouse pointer faster than people do in a standard pointing test. It controls a simulated human body, describes what it sees in video so that a grabbed object can be found again, and plays a jump-and-run and Doom. All of it runs live in the browser; the measurements are on the model pages.