Gadgetory

hey this has been popper reporting for The Verge from CES 2014 I'm standing here with the will which is a advanced wheelchair created by a team of engineers in Japan folks who previously worked at places like Nissan Sony Toyota and Olympus there's a lot of interesting components to the will first obviously is the design which is more futuristic than anything I've seen before in a wheelchair so you notice this arm here folds up to make it easy to to get in from the side and then when you sit down you just drop this down like this I turn it on here to power it up those lights go blue so this is the controller here what's really interesting about this is it's designed to work just like a mouse so I have 360 degrees of motion here I can go left I can go right and I just started you know using it a couple minutes ago it it's extremely intuitive you know I feel like I'm able to direct it with a lot of certainty and I can make kind of complex maneuvers the wheel design which includes these 24 separate tires is made so that you can have a really tight turning radius for indoors and also four-wheel drive so that when you're outdoors you can go over any kind of terrain so this is the will it'll be available for around $9,500 starting in April it could place your pre-orders now and they're gonna do a pretty limited run between 50 and 100 units you know this is the third prototype and they're continuing to improve it as they have more and more people test it out