It is also missing a foot rest.

There is often a great big gap between what is available (meets basic requirements) and what is possible (crabchair). It is the space that is to boring for large companies to bother with.

Similar to "concept cars", these kind of things are never really made to be built. It's unfortunate if that sometimes takes attention away from actually making a better product.

Now we can all ride around like Nute Gunray:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Mechno-chair/Legends

Low-key want.

Nobody asked for it because nobody knew a crab chair was an option! Now I don’t need my legs to get a coffee?? Sign me up.

I really dislike attitudes like the author's. I think it's great and important that people and companies spend considerable amounts of their time and money exploring the limits of design and what's possible, even if the concepts produced have little direct, practical use today. That kind of speculative R&D can lead to great things and who knows, maybe in 20 years it will lead to something amazing that will benefit a great deal of people.

Trying to pooh-pooh the ideas of tomorrow because they don't immediately solve all the problems of today is just terrible, short-sighted thinking.

And on a more pedantic note, obviously someone asked for it, else it wouldn't have been made at all. What the author really means is "I didn't ask for a crab chair".

What are they going on about? I showed this to my seven year old who is wheelchair bound and she asked me when she’s getting her robot legs. She’d absolutely love to have a crab leg chair that could get her up and down the stairs without having to transfer from her wheelchair to her stair lift. Move up and down a little so she could reach something out of a cabinet instead of having to ask big sister or mom and dad for help a hundred times a day.

You have to build proof of concepts before you can ever even think about mass producing any sort of product, I feel like that’s obvious?

The weird part is that the author actually does want a crab chair. He gushes about how awesome it would be.

His real gripe is that the bleeding edge prototype is too expensive.