If you have ever been in a wheelchair for any reason, then you probably know that an inability to walk can pose great problems. I know when I was in a wheelchair for a brief period of time due to an injury, it was really frustrating not being able to walk. In efforts to provide a solution, Honda has been developing a type of support system that is able to help people with weakened leg muscles walk again. On April 20-23, Honda will be showing off a prototype at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) World Congress in Detroit. However, before this event, Honda has plans to show off their prototype to some media in New York.

Essentially, the support device consists of straps that wrap around your waist and knees, and then a few plastic pieces that have important jobs. The plastic pieces are designed to collect information on hip motions as well as how you walk to accurately change to match your gait. The whole idea is to figure out when to provide assistance to your walk, and when to leave it alone. The computer measures how much to increase your average stride, in order to make walking easier.

A few years ago futurologists predicted that the future led in movement (or gesture) recognition and they have most certainly been proved right. Quite a few major products on the market, such as the wii or iPhone use gesture recognition to manipulate images, text and obviously games. However for the PC, the gesture recognition movement has passed by without any real difference, until a small young company came up with this ingenious piece of software.

Not much is known about the specifics of the software, as the only real information is the video (above) that has been circulating the internet. However the general idea is that the software uses any webcam to locate and select an object (e.g. a colored stick or bottle) which it then monitors for 3D movement. This is then converted into whatever form is necessary, such as that for a mouse, a gun in FPS games or a steering wheel.