Video Game News

The Wii Vitality Sensor is no more :(

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So those of you with good memories may remember Nintendo announcing at E3 2009 that they were working on something called a “vitality sensor”. They said that this would be a gadget that attaches to your fingertip, would figure out all sort of things about your energy level and stress level from your heart rate, and would adjust gameplay accordingly.

vitality sensor

Of course, at the time I was pretty excited about it; after all, treadmills and exercise bikes have had pulse sensors for a while. How cool would it be to have intelligent games that would adjust based on your pulse? Remember, at the time there was no Kinect or anything like that, so this was pretty cutting edge stuff.

Of course, EA Sports Active 2 came out not too long after, complete with their pretty cool wireless heart rate detector, which sort of took some of the steam out of the Vitality Sensor. We never really heard anything about it (except how it “wasn’t ready yet”) until this week, when Nintendo president Satoru Iwata officially announced that it was in a pending state, which translates to it being pretty much dead.

Hopefully this doesn’t bode poorly for the other Wii peripheral mentioned at last year’s E3, the “Fit Meter”, due to launch with Wii Fit U this coming holiday season.

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