Nintendo: Wii Vitality Sensor ready when it’s ready

Courtesy of Joystiq

In a recent Q&A with investors after a financial briefing, president and CEO of Nintendo Satoru Iwata revealed that the not-very-talked-about Vitality Sensor peripheral from the Kyoto, Japan-based corporation is not canceled, and he also explained the long development time, according to the video game business website IndustryGamers.

The Vitality Sensor controller was first debuted at E3 2009, and since then, there has been very talk from Nintendo about the pulse-rate-over-one’s-finger-looking gizmo.

Iwata admitted that Nintendo wants to make sure the Vitality Sensor for the Nintendo Wii console is a great experience for all users because the quality for the device isn’t there yet.

“I imagine that you are worried about that because it hasn’t been put on the market even though a long time has passed since it was initially announced,” Iwata told investors. “This is a totally new type of entertainment, and there are large individual differences in the biological information of humans. For example, if it was acceptable that only 80 percent of the users thought the result was natural, then we could propose this to consumers right now. However, we are aiming for a level of quality in which 99 per cent of consumers feel comfortable, and that is why this project is taking time to complete.”

Now although the Vitality Sensor project isn’t canned, Nintendo is still not committing to a time frame for the peripheral’s release.

“I feel that this project has a lot of interesting potential, and we would like to continue this project without giving up,” Iwata continued, “but it is difficult to overcome this hurdle, so please understand that now I cannot clearly say when we will be ready to put this on the market.”