Vitality Sensor Could Still Launch, But Not Until The Tech Works – Iwata

Every day since since its reveal at E3 2009 we’ve been waiting in baited breath for another slice, another piece of pleasure that is the Vitality Sensor.

Recently at an Nintendo Investors Meeting Q&A Session, Satoru Iwata was asked about the finger pulse reader and more importantly where is it.

Looks like we won’t be seeing it any time soon as it turns out the thing doesn’t work for nine out of then people.

[quote]The Wii Vitality Sensor was under development as an accessory for Wii. We thought it would be interesting to understand how the human autonomic nerve functions while using the Wii Vitality Sensor, and we did develop trial software and showed the media some of its features. We pushed forward its development on the academic assumption that by observing the wave patterns of the human pulse, we could quantify how tense or relaxed a person is, or to be more specific, how much the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves work as functions of the autonomic nerve. However, after a large-scale test of a prototype inside the company, we found out that for some people the sensor did not work as expected. We wondered if we should commercialize a product which works as expected for 90 people out of 100, but not so for the other 10 people. Though I am sorry that we did not give any specific updates after this product’s initial announcement, I would say that knowing that a product has a problem we should not launch it for the sole reason that we have already announced it.

The Wii Vitality Sensor is an interesting device, and we did various experiments to see what is possible when it was combined with a video game. But, as a result, 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. We would like to launch it into the market if technology advancements enable 999 of 1,000 people to use it without any problems, not only 90 out of 100 people. I actually think that it must be 1,000 of 1,000 people, 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.

In any case, its launch has been pending because we decided that the Wii Vitality Sensor’s current result is insufficient as a commercial product.[/quote]

So Nintendo hasn’t given up on the Vitality sensor just yet, but until such a time the technology works one hundred percent of the time we’re not going to see anything more on it.

It’s a shame no?