I recieved my HTC Vive roomscale VR device last week, and I’m phenomenally impressed. It’s a massive leap forward from the seated VR experiences of the Oculus Rift Developer Kits, and much closer to what I would consider “True” Virtual Reality.

As a result, I’ve immediately leaped into test development for it.

So here’s a small proof of concept: nothing complex, just a viewer for a few of Valve’s Dota 2 game models.

It’s interesting and impressive how well some of them, particularly Crystal Maiden and Antimage, work in the VR environment.

Here’s a short video of the DOTAViewer in use:

Notes and instructions for use:

Touch the trackpad on either controller to preview a teleport move - a red sphere will appear where you’re going to teleport to.

Press the trackpad to teleport.

Note that this is ABSOLUTELY NOT a polished experience - this is a very early dev build by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing :) Movement is shonky, teleport controls have bugs galore, and the framerate ain’t where I’d like it to be.

Things I’d like to improve:

I’d love to have the characters animated, but currently extracting animations from DOTA2 appears very hard. If you know how to do it, please contact me!

I’d also like to put the characters in an authentic DOTA2 environment with trees and so on. Again, can’t figure out how to do that with the current version of DOTA2. If you know, please contact me!

The Chaperone, at least on my version, was close to omnipresent. I’d like to tune it to only appear when you’re close to the edge of the play area, but couldn’t find the control to do so. Know? Again, please contact me.

Performance isn’t great. Not sure why. Will fix.

The locomotion currently is terrible. Fairly easy to fix - if I do a 0.2 that’ll be in there.

Let me know what you think! You can contact me on Twitter or Facebook, or join the discussion on Reddit or Hacker News.