Afference Inc

Afference Inc, founded in 2022 and based in Boulder, Colorado, develops wearable neural interfaces that generate artificial tactile sensations by stimulating nerves directly. The company's approach, which it terms Neural Haptics, allows users to feel digital content without relying on the vibration or pressure-based actuators conventional to haptic feedback. Its work spans neural interfaces, low-power chip-scale electronics and human-computer interaction.

The company's two principal products are the Afference Ring and the Phantom platform. The Afference Ring, a wearable neural interface ring, is intended as a reference design for extending neural haptics to other form factors, including watches and handheld tools; it received a CES 2024 Best of Innovation Award. Phantom produces referred sensations, enabling users to feel stimuli both beneath and away from the device itself, and is suited to augmented, virtual and extended reality as well as conventional digital interfaces. Operating at chip scale, it is claimed to use five to seven times less power than conventional haptic solutions, a figure of particular relevance to battery-constrained mobile and wearable applications.

Afference positions its technology across the AR, VR, XR and consumer electronics verticals. The company is rooted in decades of academic neural interface research at Case Western Reserve University's Human Fusions Institute, and describes a research-driven culture oriented towards the future of human-computer interaction.