Selling Chopsticks To Build A VR Villa At Conventions Everywhere
Jeff and Lidiane Basladynski are the owners of Baz.LLC, a U.S.-based provider of custom chopsticks.
There’s the website where they sell the utensils one set at a time, and they also bring their wares to conventions everywhere. Since 2016 when he tried the HTC Vive powered by SteamVR Tracking, Jeff Basladynski has also been obsessed with virtual reality.
In the years since that eye-opening demo, the pair have taken their little niche of custom chopsticks designed in the United States and attached it to his passion for VR. That means at conventions where they’ve got a small stand selling unique chopsticks, he’s happy to talk to the organizers of the event and occupy any additional available space to let some VR fans introduce complete noobs to the technology.
Enter the VR Villa.
On the site for the community effort built on Baz chopsticks, you’ll see the support listed in prominent spaces from developers of some of the best games in the VR market, including Schell Games, Resolution Games, and I-Illusions, along with a calendar of upcoming events where he and volunteers will be hauling headsets out for others to check out in protected areas.
“ I’m part of the vendor community where a lot of small businesses go to all these conventions all over. It’s a very small niche group. It’s usually the same people in that industry is very small. It’s the same players, same people, same everything, just you just got different attendees and that’s it,” Jeff Basladynski said. “And then because of that a lot of convention chairs, they see me, they see what we do, how we do it, and then I usually say, ‘hey, you know, I do VR gaming, you want me to help? I’ve got all this equipment we can do some of these things.’ And it kind of spawned off from there.”
There’s a Discord for VR Villa and here’s their upcoming schedule:
Coastal Comic Con Wilmington, NC March 7-8
Game On Expo Phoenix, AZ March 13-15
Golden State Fur Con Los Angeles, CA March 13-15
KawaiiKon Honolulu, HI April 24-26
LVL UP Expo Las Vegas, NV April 24-26
Furry Weekend Atlanta Atlanta, GA May 7-10
MomoCon Atlanta, GA May 21-24
The Dream Of A VR LAN Party
One of the reasons Jeff Basladynski created this connection between the chopsticks business at conventions and VR is due to his deep love for LAN parties.
A group of friends hauling monitors and PC towers down the street for a weekend spent on machines that can barely run the game, all to enjoy face-to-face connections with zero latency over a local network, is something VR Villa aims to tap into. This is despite almost everything about the way the current consumer head-mounted displays are architected making the dream difficult to achieve. If you head to an Apple Store, for example, you’ll be attended to by worker and when you put the professional-grade headset on your head you’ll turn a single dial to adjust the fit while the lenses auto-adjust to fit your particular face. When a curious passerby approaches the VR Villa, several people are involved in fitting a Quest headset and teaching the player how to enjoy the game.
“I’m just there to make sure that they understand what the technology is, what the limitations are, how they can play the game. We’re fully curated. So every single time that a person comes to our game room, they go to our front desk, they ask what games are available, they ask questions, or we even ask ‘em what games you usually play on a flat screen,” Jeff Basladynski said. “And then we can pare this down to you. If you like a shooter game, maybe play Vail. If you wanna have a casual game play Fruit Ninja. It runs like a restaurant. So they go to our usher, we already designated their booth and their headset, and then we walk them over there. We teach ‘em the game they’re about to play. And then we help and put [a headset] on their heads physically because, if the headset is off it could really limit their perception of how the gaming experience is. We are really adamant about that, it’s a very labor intensive process…they’re probably interacting with four of my staff.”
Jeff Basladynski has never run a flat LAN game through headsets at these events and I understand why — it’s just too difficult. Still, I believe VR fanatics should be able to roll into the BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) LAN party at Quakecon each year with a head-mounted display in tow.
You’ll likely wear a Quest 3 if you attend a convention with VR Villa this year — they recently retired all their Quest 2 headsets. That said, Jeff Basladynski seems to be as excited as I am for what Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame headset might do for these events. Valve is about to ship a headset — as soon as prices stabilize — promising an incredible advance in both openness and weight distribution.
Currently, VR Villa has 65 Quest 3 and 3S systems ready to deploy as needed, though many events just see a couple dozen headsets brought out. I asked Jeff Basladynski how many Steam Frames he expects to have by the end of the year.
“That is a Valve question. No idea. Many,” he says.
I pushed a little further by rewording my question.
“How many Steam Frames do you want to have in your possession by the end of 2026?”
“All of them,” Basladynski replied.