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" A humiliating silence filled the Nokia Theater yesterday after Nintendo&amp;#039;s president Satoru Iwata took the stage during the company E3 keynote to announce Nintendo&amp;#039;s latest peripheral, the Wii Vitality Sensor. The sensor could not look less attractive. It&amp;#039;s a white, finger-size plastic device similar to the sort of heart monitor you might find in an ER. The sensor promises to connect games to its player&amp;#039;s vital stats, allowing the two to work together in some way that, well, is still unclear. Though it&amp;#039;s easy to imagine how the gadget would work with the Wii Fit, together the two machines would look less like fun, and more like rehabilitative physical therapy. A heart-rate monitor could work well with a survival horror game like Dead Space by making the game scarier just when you least expect it, but we doubt that the company is going in that direction. Instead, the muddy announcement flopped, deflating a press conference that opened with the crowd-pleasing announcement of a new Mario platform for the Wii. It was as if the audience had mistaken this foreign gadget for some morbid parody (what Wii Fit is to the young and sprightly, Vitality Sensor is to the old and geriatric). But it is a mistake to underestimate Nintendo and its sometimes bizarre attempts at innovation. The company&amp;#039;s recent generation of technology, while mocked by hard-core gamers, has managed to sell. And sell well. Journalists at the announcement were clearly unimpressed, but perhaps that&amp;#039;s because gaming writers just aren&amp;#039;t the Vitality Sensor&amp;#039;s core audience. Or, it could simply have been a bad presentation. As we learned yesterday with Microsoft&amp;#039;s stunning E3 announcements, ambition can trump reality. Project Natal, the Xbox 360&amp;#039;s new video-camera-control system, would have been equally charmless had the company not partnered it with extensive footage of the product&amp;#039;s potential--teens capturing their images and dressing themselves virtually with an endless closet of clothes, a young boy scanning his skateboard and taking it and his kickflips to a computer-generated park, etc. On the other hand, Mr. Iwata&amp;#039;s dry, canned speech simply didn&amp;#039;t tell us what&amp;#039;s exciting about connecting your pulse to your favorite games. Nor did he offer a price point. Or a release date. Or even a game (or type of game) that will take advantage of the device, let alone warrant its unknown price tag. Nintendo has a history of playing its cards close to its chest, revealing titles only a few months before release. That has worked well for it in the past. But if the company hopes to compete with the hype produced by Microsoft, which is offering buyers a taste of what&amp;#039;s ahead a long way down the road, it should hit us with a splash. Not a heart monitor.   RELATED STORIES * MORE E3: Is Project Natal Exciting, or a Dud?  * PLUS: Top 10 Racing Games At E3  * EARLIER: Why Dead Space Is the Scariest Game Ever  * FOLLOW US: Popular Mechanics is Now on Twitter!  * FRIEND US: Find PM on Facebook   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12322/4319974/>