The Fatera and the Wii Fit

During last year’s TechTalk we had the La Fatera idea. The Fatera’s concept was a scale connected via WiFi to a Fonera, with the purpose of letting users loose weight in a social way, like Alcoholics Anonymous for weight loss: if you decide you want to loose weight and your weight gets notified every morning to your friends, you’ll probably have more chances to reach your goal for the pressure of your group of friends. Well, this year Nintendo launched the Wii Fit, a similar product, now available in Europe but not in the States yet, and we have tried it during the Menorca TechTalk. My friend Loic Le Meur took this video.

It’s fun to see how the Wii Fit starts from punishing you, easily declaring you fat and old. Fat makes sense as the device can get your weight. You first tell it how tall you are and it then tells you if you’re fat or not. Anyway it’s not very good for muscular people, as it said Loic was fat, while he’s just very muscular. Not only fat, but the Wii also said he was old: he is 36 but according to the Wii Fit he’s 54, just because of how he balances his weight while standing. It declared my weight ideal, but it gave me 63 years old, because my center of balance is moved to the front.

What is interesting is that the Wii Fit also lets you play games like skiing. People at Nintendo must be geniuses, they built a console completely different from their main competitors’s products (the PS3 and Xbox 360), yet our guests at TechTalk were queuing to play.