On the downside, Nintendo has canceled another piece of technology, and we will likely never know exactly what they were planning for it—always frustrating for a company known to try strange ideas. On the upside, their planned sleep sensor now can’t turn the NX into a niche, health-focused nightmare, so that’s a relief.
Not that I was expecting Nintendo to build their new piece of hardware around a sleep sensor they announced back in 2014, but again, Nintendo likes to do weird things, so I’m kind of glad that’s no longer an option at all. It looks like the decision might be part of the change in leadership after Nintendo president Satoru Iwata’s passing, with current president Tatsumi Kimishima taking an opportunity during an investor briefing to explain that the sensor wasn’t seen as a viable product despite no one having asked about it.
According to Wired, Kimishima said,
In regards to the Quality of Life [device], which was not mentioned in any of today’s questions, we do not have the conviction that the sleep-and-fatigue-themed [device] can enter the phase of actually becoming a product. We no longer have any plans to release it by the end of March 2016. On the other hand, we still believe there are things we can do in the general category of Quality of Life, and we will continue to study the possibility of expanding into this field.
Of course, this isn’t a whole lot different from the case of the Nintendo Vitality Sensor (which you’ve probably also forgotten about), a device that plugged into the Wii remote and could monitor the user’s heart rate by attaching to a finger. It was officially canceled in 2013, a few years after its initial announcement, after no one had talked about it or demonstrated it in quite a while.
Still, Wired also references a much more optimistic quote from Iwata on the matter, and it’s hard not to see this as part of the larger picture of at least a slight change in the company’s thinking under new leadership.
(via Daily Dot, image via Nintendo)
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