Vayl is a transparent overlay that runs on top of your apps, pulsing light and sound across your screen to keep your brain locked in for hours.
Runs locally.·No screen recording.·No keystroke content.
Your work already happens on a screen. Vayl uses that screen as a focus system.
Keep the larger task in mind while moving between tabs, apps, messages, and decisions.
Support attention during long sessions of coding, analysis, research, writing, monitoring, or deep work.
When attention starts to fade, Vayl can gently adjust the environment instead of interrupting your workflow.
A short walk through the loop. Four steps, nothing complicated.
Knowledge work has a cost most teams don't measure: the time it takes to recover from a context switch.
Most existing tools don't help. They ask you to stop working — open an app, start a session, put on a headset, take a break. The cost lives during the work, so the fix has to live there too.
Built on decades of audiovisual stimulation research.
For more than 50 years, researchers have studied how rhythmic light and sound can influence attention, arousal, and brain activity. Vayl brings that principle into the modern desktop: subtle, task-compatible stimulation that runs during real work — not lab demos.
The work moves frequency-locked stimulation from "promising in principle" to deployable in an aircraft cockpit. It tackles the two questions a real-world environment forces: can you measure attention through stimulation that operators tolerate over hours, and does the stimulation produce a targeted attentional benefit, not just a generic slowdown.
A 45-minute Mackworth's clock task simulates the long, monotonous cruise leg. A subtle 14 Hz flicker tracked vigilance lapses — the model could see attention falling off before a target was missed.
10 Hz alpha flicker against a 30 Hz control, across three contrast conditions. A textured low-contrast variant rated most comfortable — and still selectively reduced flanker interference, a targeted benefit, not a uniform slowdown.
Vayl runs locally. It does not record your screen, read your files, or capture keystroke content.
No cloud. No raw data leaves your computer. The signals Vayl reads are summarized into state estimates locally and discarded.
Gaze stability, blink patterns, mouse rhythm, app switching. Never your screen content, file content, or what you type.
The only thing Vayl saves between sessions is a personalization profile that adapts the app to you. You own it. You can delete it.
Free download. Local install. No sign-up required. Apple-signed and notarized. Apple Silicon Mac (M-series chip, 2020 or newer) · macOS 14+; Windows in development.