A follow-up was made during the shareholder meeting about the development of the Wii Vitality Sensor.
Plans about the gaming giant developing a gaming accessory that will react on the human pulse of the player through the Nintendo Wii Vitality Sensor was revealed to the public in the E3 2009 stage show. After almost four years, there is still no site of this promising product.
Satoru Iwata, current chief operating officer of Nintendo Co., was asked during the Q&A of the 73rd Annual General Meeting of Shareholders for an update.
Iwata responded to the question that they proceeded in developing the game accessory after their announcement in 2009 and even conducted trials of it with demo in the media. They were excited to see if the product could reveal how tense or relaxed the player is during game play by linking the accessory to the human pulse to capture the response of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves. However, the prototypes showed inconsistent performance.
Some sensor did not work for some people who participated in the trial. The reliability rate is only 90 percent which means 10 out 100 buyers, if ever they market it, will be dissatisfied and complain about the sensor not functioning.
Iwata admitted that he should have informed the public that they were postponing the development of the said product. “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.
Nintendo would like to have at least a 99.99 percent accuracy result before they launch the sensor which they failed to meet. The company decided to postpone the development of this product and focus their resources on other products.
Iwata promised to be careful in announcing products that they yet to develop to avoid disappointing prospective buyers.
