DMM Connect Chat

» see vrlab.dmm.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

DMM VR lab was set up inside DMM.com in December 2018 as a research division, and from April 2020 it was running joint research with the University of Tokyo's virtual reality center. Its 2019 game BOW MAN had a feature that loaded your own avatar, and that feature grew into a product: DMM VR Connect, released as a beta on 25 November 2020. You put a VRM model and a stream key into a DMM account, and other people's Unity applications asked for them through an SDK. There were four calls in it, one of which existed because typing a password while wearing a headset is miserable, so you signed in through Google or Facebook instead. The whole thing was free, and from 6 July 2021 it was open source under an MIT license.

Connect Chat arrived on Steam in early access on 26 January 2021. Windows only, and no headset required: there was a desktop mode that took over automatically when you lifted the goggles off your head. Rooms were public or private behind a four-digit passcode, your avatar came out of a web My Page, the audio was spatial, your hands and your mouth moved, and you could hold ten avatars of up to 64 megabytes each. There was a world-building kit for Unity called CCSDK. People who had neither a gaming PC nor a headset were not given a cut-down client; they were pointed at a video stream of the space on DMM's video service.

Across nineteen months, exactly two events held inside it got written down anywhere. A Vocaloid concert on 26 March 2022, GUMI and UNA performing in a venue called Virtual harevutai. And a children's virtual exhibition that ran from 16 March to 15 April, hosted by the city of Kitakyushu with DMM as co-organizer. A Vocaloid gig and a municipal kids' show, overlapping each other, in the same software.

~ the chronicle ~

~ thirty worlds ~

When the official version shipped on 15 March 2022, DMM's release said more than thirty distinctive worlds had already been posted to it. That sentence contains the only usage figure anybody published about Connect Chat in its entire life. There is no user count in any source. The 35.45 million that appears in the press release counts DMM.com group members, not people who ever opened this. Steam's store entry is delisted and the API answers with a flat failure, so not even a review total survives as a proxy, and 4Gamer, which covered the app twice in nineteen months, never covered the shutdown.

The money was meant to come from two directions in the same client. Consumers paid nothing and got unlimited original avatars. Companies could run events for free and hand DMM a share of whatever the tickets brought in. Nothing in the pitch mentions offices or remote work, which was the standard sales line for this kind of software in 2021. The corporate half was entertainment: virtual lives and exhibitions.

~ the layer underneath ~

VR Connect's launch release named no partner applications at all. It said compatible VR and 3D apps, and promised they would appear in sequence from December 2020. What is recorded as having actually connected, two years later, comes to five things: Connect Chat itself, a third-party iPhone face-tracking tool called waidayo, a Steam app called Unmetaverse that depended on it completely, CafeSingularity's Avatar Physical Touch, and a rhythm game that lost only its avatar feature. That inventory exists in one hobbyist's diary post from July 2022 and nowhere else, which is itself the finding.

~ noon on the last day of august ~

DMM had already warned third-party developers in May 2022 that the integration was ending, without naming a day. The notice came on 12 August. The English text DMM posted to Steam said business circumstances had left it no other choice. The Japanese, as ITmedia carried it, said the team had kept working on improvements and events but had judged further development and continuation difficult. VR Connect got a shorter sentence: continuation was difficult for various reasons.

Connect Chat ended at 12:00 on Wednesday 31 August 2022, and Unmetaverse ended at the same minute. DMM VR lab itself now sits in the encyclopedia's list of DMM services that have finished, alongside the two products it died with. Every host the lab ever ran returns no DNS record at all.

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