Oh Wii Vitality Sensor, we hardly knew ye… in that we didn’t know you at all. Nintendo introduced the pulse-sensing Wii peripheral at its E3 2009 stage show, and said we’d hear more in “the future.” That future never came, despite occasional assurances that the device still existed. During a recent Q&A with Nintendo head Satoru Iwata, an analyst brought up the device once more, and Iwata said it encountered too many issues in quality assurance testing to bring to market.
“We have not been able to launch it as a commercial product because we could not get it to work as we expected and it was of narrower application than we had originally thought,” he told investors. According to Iwata’s estimates, approximately 90 out of 100 people were able to use the Vitality Sensor without a hitch, though he (thankfully) requires that it work with “1,000 of 1,000 people.” However, he admitted “but [since we use the living body signal with individual differences] it is a little bit of a stretch to make it applicable to every single person.” He’d still love to make the Vitality Sensor a reality “if technology enhancements” allow, but thus far, testing renders it “insufficient as a commercial product.”
In other Nintendo news, Iwata assured investors that he will continue to monitor employee cafeteria quality-related concerns. Seriously though, that was a question.
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