The vitality sensor is full of potential, says Nintendo, it’s just not ready for primetime yet.
It’s been nearly two years since Nintendo announced the Wii Vitality Sensor, but it remains, as yet, unreleased. You could be forgiven for thinking that Nintendo had abandoned the project, but according to CEO Satoru Iwata, that isn’t the case. Speaking to investors last month, he said that Nintendo is simply trying to perfect the peripheral before it releases it.
Iwata said that Nintendo could release the Vitality Sensor right now, and nearly everyone would feel comfortable with it. The problem was, he said, that if Nintendo did release it now, there’d be a few people – around one in five, by his estimate – who weren’t comfortable. He said that Nintendo’s goal was to get that number down to one in a hundred, and only then would it release it.
“This is a totally new type of entertainment,” he said. “And there are large individual differences in the biological information of humans.” Nevertheless, he felt that the project had “a lot of interesting potential,” and said that Nintendo was hopeful that it would eventually bring the product to market. He was reluctant to try to put a time on when that might be, however.
Back in 2009, Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo America, defended the Vitality Sensor, comparing it with other Wii peripherals that people didn’t understand at first, and saying that Nintendo had software in the pipeline that would show off just what the sensor could do. Right now though, it seems like it doesn’t even work as it’s supposed to, and although Nintendo has a history of hardware innovation, even it may struggle to find the fun in a heart monitor.
Source: Industry Gamers
Published: May 3, 2011 12:35 pm