niconicoVR

» see info.nicovideo.jp/niconicovr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The consumer Gear VR reached Japanese shops on 18 December 2015 at a street price around 13,800 yen. It was a plastic shell with two lenses and a touchpad on the side, and no computer in it at all. The computer was your phone, and it had to be a Galaxy S6 or an S6 edge, because Samsung had built the mount for exactly those two handsets. Eight apps were waiting in the store that opening day. Three of them were Japanese, and one of those was niconicoVR.

What Dwango shipped was a native Gear VR application, distributed through the Oculus Store and nowhere else. It installed onto the headset itself rather than running in a browser or inside the existing phone app. You put the headset on and found yourself in a room with a video panel hanging in front of you, playing whatever you had queued from Niconico. Then the comments started, and they did not stay on the panel.

Two other things in it were worth the build. One was 手元ウォッチ, a porthole cut into the virtual floor that showed you a live feed from the phone's rear camera, so you could locate a drink or a snack without removing the headset. Dwango's own product shot has a real donut and a real cup of coffee sitting in that hole in the floor. The other was 視聴姿勢追随, posture following, which let the whole room reorient itself when you lay down, on the correct assumption that nobody watches three hours of video sitting upright.

Getting into any of this meant a Galaxy S6 with a Gear VR strapped to its face, bought through an Oculus account whose region was set to Japan. I owned none of that in 2015 and could not have assembled it in Ankara at any price. The honest part is that almost nobody owned it anywhere. Buying in meant two purchases, a flagship phone and a headset that fitted only that phone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the panel could not hold them ~

Niconico's whole idea is that other people's comments scroll across the video while you watch it. On a browser the comment track is bounded by the edges of the player, which is a constraint nobody had ever thought of as a constraint, because on a screen there is nowhere else for text to go. In a headset there is. Dwango let the 弾幕 leave the panel and keep going into the room.

Mado no Mori, Impress's software desk, described the appeal as the comments flowing across your entire field of view in a way that surrounds you. MoguraVR put it more plainly: the comments swirl around and fill your vision. Dwango's own screenshot bears this out. The comment text is rendered larger than the video panel itself and carries on past its edges into the room. The video stayed a rectangle. The audience did not.

~ a window cut in the virtual floor ~

Japanese Wikipedia calls the camera feature 手元カメラ. The product page and the press materials both call it 手元ウォッチ, and that is the name to keep. The distinction matters less than what it admits: Dwango knew people would want to eat while wearing this thing, and rather than pretend otherwise, they put a hole in the world and pointed a camera through it.

Posture following came from the same honest place. A headset that assumes you are sitting up and facing forward is a headset designed for a demo, not for an evening. 視聴姿勢追随 took the question of how you were actually sitting and made it the player's problem instead of yours.

~ what you were allowed to say ~

At launch you could read comments but not write them. Posting arrived on 9 April 2016 in version 1.5, and it arrived with a limit: かんたんコメント, easy comment, a palette of stock phrases you selected with the headset's touchpad. There was no keyboard in a Gear VR and nobody had solved text entry, so Dwango shipped the fixed menu rather than nothing.

The same gap shows up on the way in. You could not search Niconico by text from inside the headset. A service whose library runs to millions of videos gave you no way to type the name of one, so getting to a specific video meant queueing it elsewhere first. For 360 content the app read a user-applied tag, Equirectangular, and switched modes on that, so the format detection ran on a label any viewer could add.

~ 122 ratings ~

The only public number this app ever produced is its Oculus Store rating count. On 11 May 2018 it stood at 101 ratings. By 8 July 2018 it had reached 122, averaging 3.3 stars. No download figure or user figure was ever published for it, while the same product page advertised niconico's 数千万人のユーザー, tens of millions of users, for the service as a whole. It did reach Oculus Go in May 2018, which is where most of its final year of coverage sits, and that widened the hardware gate from one Samsung flagship to a 199-dollar standalone headset. Twenty-one more ratings followed.

~ the notice and the day after it ~

Dwango posted the notice to blog.nicovideo.jp on 1 November 2018, six short lines of it. The app would end on Wednesday 12 December and could not be used after that date. A line marked with a reference mark adds that you could go on enjoying niconico from a PC or a phone. No reason was offered and no successor was named. There is a typo in the opening courtesy line, where 「まことに」 came out as 「まことにに」, and nobody has been back to fix it since. Forty-one days after the notice, Dwango added 【2018年12月12日(水) 追記】 to the top of the same page: today we ended the Gear VR niconico VR app. The app itself was never pulled off anyone's headset. The servers simply stopped answering it, and from then on it failed at the login screen.

One adjacency is worth recording precisely, because it is tempting and it is not evidence. The shutdown notice is dated 1 November 2018. On 2 November 2018, the next day, Dwango announced that バーチャルキャスト could now play Niconico videos inside VR space. Both documents are first-party and both are dated. Neither document mentions the other, and no source has ever connected them. What you have is two Dwango announcements about watching Niconico in a headset, published twenty-four hours apart. The shutdown notice names no successor, and the Virtual Cast release does not mention niconicoVR.

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