Explore a fruit-fly connectome inside a living sandbox
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.
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.
About FLYBOX on Product Hunt
“Explore a fruit-fly connectome inside a living sandbox”
FLYBOX launched on Product Hunt on September 25th, 2026 and earned 57 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #65 on the daily leaderboard. 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.
On the analytics side, FLYBOX competes within Open Source, Developer Tools, Artificial Intelligence, GitHub and Vercel Day — topics that collectively have 1.1M followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how FLYBOX performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted FLYBOX?
FLYBOX was hunted by Gaurav . A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of FLYBOX including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Gaurav 