Simulated Fly Brain Learns to Fly in Virtual Environment

Startup Odyssey integrated a simulated fruit fly brain into its Odyssey-3 world generative model. Now, virtual intelligence can independently navigate through AI-generated spaces that are visually identical to reality.

Odyssey-3 is not a physical engine but a video generator that creates each subsequent frame based on previous ones and the 'player's' actions. In this experiment, the role of the player was taken by a digital twin of the Drosophila brain.

The model was reconstructed based on the real neural connectivity map of the insect and includes about 140,000 neurons and approximately 50 million synapses. The system's performance was demonstrated in a 29-second first-person video showing flight along a generated harbor.

Despite the impressive visualization, Odyssey has not yet published scientific papers, method descriptions, or open-source code for the project. Due to the lack of technical documentation, it remains unknown which specific neurons control flight and whether the virtual brain processes generated frames directly.