Fly Terrarium

Run the single-fly demo · Run the experimental colony · Project page

What is running

This is the WebGPU application supplied with FlyTerrarium: a spiking circuit drives a NeuroMechFly body while a MaleCNS-style brain view displays activity. The bundled data contains 564 simulated neurons and 5,523 connections per fly.

The circuit is a hand-wired synthetic demo, not extracted connectome connectivity. The CNS outline uses the MaleCNS template; neuron arbors and background context cells are synthetic. Context cells are scenery and are not simulated. The embedded preview uses 8,000 context cells; the full demo defaults to 30,000. Neither number is a count of simulated neurons.

Descending commands drive a walking pattern generator. Body reflexes and scripted flight supplement the neural model. The Unity/Quest project is separate from this browser preview; the supplied documentation says it has not yet been run inside Unity or on a headset.

Credits from the supplied project

• MaleCNS connectome: HHMI Janelia FlyEM, MRC LMB, University of Cambridge, Google Research. Sexual dimorphism in the complete Drosophila male central nervous system connectome, Cell (2026). CC-BY 4.0.
• MaleCNS template outline: JRCFIB2022M brain and VNC meshes, HHMI Janelia FlyEM; distributed in the flybrains package (navis; Bates et al.).
• NeuroMechFly / FlyGym: body, meshes, step kinematics and CPG controller. Lobato-Rios et al., Nature Methods (2022); Wang-Chen et al., Nature Methods (2024). Apache-2.0.
• Brain model: Shiu et al., A Drosophila computational brain model reveals sensorimotor processing, Nature (2024).
• MuJoCo: Google DeepMind, Apache-2.0. Used by the project's body modelling tools and optional Unity backend.
• Behavioural references: Card & Dickinson (2008); von Reyn et al. (2017); Ache et al. (2019); Bidaye et al. (2014, 2020); Rayshubskiy et al. (2020).

Portfolio integration

The simulation modules and data are copied from the supplied archive. Portfolio changes add compact controls, responsive layouts and this credits page. The previous illustrative SVG animation has been replaced.