EyeWire

Time to beat

Main story

43.5 h15 reports

Main + extras

65 h7 reports

Completionist

109 h3 reports

Median of the hours reported by players who completed the game.

Synopsis

Eyewire is a citizen science game from Sebastian Seung's Lab at Princeton University. It is a human-based computation game that uses players to map retinal neurons. Eyewire launched on December 10, 2012. The game utilizes data generated by the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. As of March 2025, Eyewire has had around 350,000 players and resulted in the tracing of 6,000 neurons. Eyewire gameplay is used for neuroscience research by enabling the reconstruction of morphological neuron data, which helps researchers model information-processing circuits. It is also used to generate a training dataset to further improve the artificial intelligence that assists the player through the gameplay. A later project spawned from Eyewire is the Flywire project, which used a similar but more selective citizen science system for its tracing and annotation. Flywire builds on Eyewire and used AIs trained on the dataset produced by Eyewire players. Flywire would go on to complete and publish the first connectome of an adult fruit fly, a structure with about 140,000 neurons. A sequel project to Eyewire, Eyewire II, was announced on March 31, 2025. It is of a similar scale to Flywire, intending to trace over 100,000 new neurons. Eyewire II is open in its alpha stages to Eyewire players ranked Scythe or higher. Eyewire II covers 1 mm2 of the mouse retina, 10 to 100 times of previous retina imaging attempts. A June 2026 preprint reports that humans have already proofread 25,000 cells from the dataset.

Text license: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

Details

Type

Game

Release date

December 10, 2012

Genres

human-based computation game, citizen science

Platforms

web browser

Created by

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Countries

United States