Show HN: flyOS – A fruit fly connectome simulated in real time on an iPhone

Hey HN, I'm Cory. When I saw Google release the fruit fly connectome, I wanted to experiment with it myself and better understand how the fruit fly brain works, so I started hacking on a few different iOS projects.

Originally I was going to create an app that let you experience BEING a fruit fly with VR, but then I realized that a fruit fly's main sense is its smell, and an iPhone can't smell. So I ended up building an app based on all of the senses an iPhone has that we could wire to a fruit fly. I came up with flyOS: basically the camera is its eyes, the CPU is its brain, etc. The neuron simulator is written from scratch in Swift and runs in real time on the phone's CPU, with no server involved.

Yes, this is partly a joke. But it's also a serious app that lets you view the neurons of a simulated fly in real time, which I think is pretty cool. I wrote a white paper and put it online to share the process of building this, and why I ultimately only ended up using 4,895 neurons out of the total 166,000 in the release.

Would love your feedback and thoughts as to how I could make the fly even more realistic and alive.