Mapping every neuron and every connection in an animal's nervous system — a full "connectome" — was, for decades, too laborious to attempt for anything more complex than a worm with a few hundred neurons. Advances in high-resolution electron microscopy and automated image analysis changed that: researchers have now reconstructed the complete wiring diagram of a fruit fly's brain and nerve cord, identifying roughly 166,700 individual neurons and well over a hundred million synaptic connections between them — arguably the most detailed map of an animal's central nervous system produced to date.
This page lets you explore that map directly: paint a patch of neurons on the brain and watch the stimulus ripple outward along real recorded connections, then see how that activity translates into movement on an anatomically accurate, three-dimensional fly body — walking, turning, or taking off, depending on which circuits were engaged. It turns an abstract wiring diagram into something you can prod, watch respond, and get an intuitive feel for, in a way a static diagram or a research paper never could.
Everything — loading the connectome, simulating neural activity, and animating the fly — runs locally in the browser once the data has been downloaded once and cached; nothing about the session is uploaded anywhere. The simulation prefers WebGPU for speed and falls back to a slower CPU-only mode automatically on devices without it.
Note: this specific tool's own on-screen controls are in English only, since it is an independent, unmodified research demo embedded here rather than a page authored for this site.
Credits & Licenses
This tool is an unmodified copy of the “Neural Canvas” demo by Xenova, embedded here as downloaded; its application code is MIT licensed. Neuron and connectivity data are from the MaleCNS v1.0 dataset (CC BY 4.0), credited to FlyEM / HHMI Janelia, the University of Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Google Research. The spiking neural model is adapted from Shiu et al., 2024; the animated fly body follows the NeuroMechFly project (EPFL); and on-device inference uses Hugging Face’s WebGPU kernels.