It’s dark and creepy in the cargo hold of the Sevastopol . As I walk between the piles of crates, a noise makes my heart skip a beat. I tell myself it was just dripping water.  I shouldn’t be scared, since I know this is just a videogame–a demo of Alien: Isolation, based on the Alien movie franchise. But I’m wearing a virtual reality headset called the Oculus Rift, and the game fills my entire field of vision. When I turn my head to look around, the world moves with me. It all feels damn real, as if I’m walking on an actual space station, being stalked by one of the creatures that stalked Sigourney Weaver. (Damn real, damn scary.)  There’s another sound, and I turn to see a heavy blast door slide open. The bipedal alien rises, closes the gap between us and grabs me, its inner jaws plunging toward my face. Frozen, I emit an involuntary squeal of panic. From behind me–this time, in the real world–I hear a laugh. Palmer Luckey, the engagingly goofy creator of the Rift, has been furtively watching me play. “You didn’t last very long,” he chortles.  Luckey has been preparing for a game like this since he was a kid–which wasn’t that long ago. He started making virtual reality headsets when he was 16. At 19 he founded his company, Oculus VR. At 21 he sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, despite the fact that it had practically no revenue, or even a commercial product–it was little more than a prototype. And now, just 22, Palmer Luckey is on the verge of doing what generations of technologists before him tried and failed–bringing virtual reality to the masses.  If you’re skeptical, you probably haven’t tried the Rift, an experience that tends to create devotees–and inspire visions of how VR will change the world in ways far beyond games. After buying the company–in many ways Facebook’s most audacious acquaintance, compared with the growing user base of Instagram, and the proven revenue model of WhatsApp–Mark Zuckerberg described it as a new communication platform on the scale of telephony or television.  “One day, we believe this kind of immersive, augmented reality will become a part of daily life for billions of people,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “By feeling truly present, you can share unbounded spaces and experiences with the people in your life.”  The applications could touch every industry. Imagine never going into an office, because you can talk to coworkers face-to-face by putting on goggles in your home. Virtual retail outlets where you can fit clothes onto a model of your body and see how they look before you buy. Immersive medical simulations where doctors practice surgeries without risk to patients. Classrooms attended by students from around the globe, and educational reenactments that let them watch history unfold. And so on. “I’ve taken the red pill,” says Michael Naimark, a veteran of Apple, Lucasfilm and the MIT Media Lab and frequent skeptic of this field. “VR headsets are here to stay.”  It’s heady stuff for the world–and Luckey (pronounced, appropriately, “lucky”). The Facebook deal gave someone barely old enough to drink a net worth FORBES estimates at well over $500 million. No one in history, not even Zuck, has ever made a fortune that big, that young. This is the year he gets to prove he was worth it.  The path to this new world began in the setting of so many modern success stories, to the point of cliché: a California garage. But Palmer Luckey wasn’t a striving Stanford grad or dot-com refugee; he was an obsessed teen, son of a Long Beach car salesman and stay-at-home mom.  The Luckeys chose to homeschool the precocious Palmer and his three sisters . In doing so, they encouraged them to pursue their passions. He studied Italian opera and trained to be a singing gondolier for tourists. He played golf, at least before another kid hit him in the face with a club, fracturing his jaw and leaving a deep scar on the most distinctive chin to roam Los Angeles since Jay Leno. And he became an expert on enough disparate topics to become something of a polymath. “McDonald’s beef is 100% beef with no fillers–the only things that are not beef are 1% salt and pepper,” he says, as we stroll past a McDonald’s one afternoon. “Normal burgers and fries have way more calories, way more fat.”  Eventually, however, teenage Luckey began spending pretty much every spare minute with either videogames (Chrono Trigger and GoldenEye 64 were among his favorites) or science fiction movies (The Matrix and The Lawnmower Man). These passions both led him to the same place. “Virtual reality is in so much science fiction, across a wide variety of stories, that even if you’re not particularly interested in VR, if you’re a sci-fi enthusiast you end up learning a lot about it,” says Luckey. “That’s what happened. I grew up my whole life thinking virtual reality was very cool, and I thought that it must exist in secret military labs somewhere.”  The idea for immersive computer displays dates back to the 1960s. Early VR prototypes were primitive, bulky and hugely expensive, built mainly for government and military applications like Air Force flight simulators. In the 1980s the PC boom raised hopes for smaller, consumer-friendly headsets and inspired art about virtual worlds, starting with William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, and peaking when nearly a dozen related films, including Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days, were released in 1995.  But while the movies sold tickets, the products went nowhere. Sometimes excessive costs killed them in their infancy: In the early 1990s Hasbro spent at least $59 million and three-plus years developing a console and headset called the Home Virtual Reality System before abandoning the project. More often VR was doomed by technical problems. In 1996 Nintendo released a $180 videogame console, the Virtual Boy, but its promise of three-dimensional graphics fell flat. The headset’s red monochrome display, low resolution and vibrating mirrors induced neck pains, dizziness and nausea. Nintendo sold fewer than 800,000 units.  This was all ancient history by the time Luckey hit his teens. Ever curious, Luckey used eBay to go on an archeological dig of sorts, scouring online sales for outdated and abandoned bits of VR hardware. He slowly amassed an impressive collection; in one score he bought a $97,000 headset for $87. To fund his efforts, he taught himself basic electronics and made $30,000 by buying broken iPhones, repairing them and flipping them for a profit.  From these failed carcasses, Luckey hacked something new. “I was modifying existing gear really heavily, using new lenses, trying to swap lenses from one system into another,” says Luckey. “I built some sh–ty stuff.” With time, though, his work improved. In 2009, at 17, Luckey entered college–the homeschooler stayed local, at Cal State, Long Beach, where he studied journalism–of all things–and spent his spare time building the custom PR1, or Prototype One.  By the summer of 2011 he landed a part-time job with VR pioneer Mark Bolas at his lab at the University of Southern California. “Without Mark there would be no Oculus,” says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist who popularized the term “virtual reality.” Bolas and his students had spent years refining VR headsets, and all their innovations were open-sourced; Luckey absorbed their wisdom and technology, and quickly applied them to his own work.  In April 2012, 19-year-old Palmer Luckey completed the sixth prototype of his home-brewed VR rig. He named it after the gap he hoped it would bridge between the real world and the virtual: the Rift.  Palmer Luckey’s prodigious success could not have happened even a few years before, as Oculus’ incubation touched on almost every startup trend of this decade. The open-source head start allowed him to begin his quest on second or even third base for free, without legally owing anyone a penny. From there he tapped into crowdsourcing, harnessing the hive at forums like MTBS3D, or “Meant to Be Seen in 3-D.” Each of his six prototypes was honed with help from these online enthusiasts, and Luckey frequently helped solve technical problems for other members of the crew .  At least one of those forum members was no ordinary hobbyist. John Carmack cofounded id Software in 1991; over the next decade he became legendary as the lead programmer on games, including Quake and Doom. In April 2012 he posted for help modifying a Sony head-mounted display. Remembers Luckey: “We had a public discussion about why it would be very difficult to do … and then a week later he contacted me in a private message and asked if he could buy or borrow one of my prototypes.”  Luckey shipped out one of his Rifts. Two months later, at the E3 videogame expo in Los Angeles, Carmack demoed a version of Doom 3 on the hardware and sang the Rift’s praises to anyone who would listen. Word spread quickly. Brendan Iribe, then chief product officer at game-streaming company Gaikai, met Luckey for a demo and was so impressed he offered an investment. In July 2012, with a few hundred thousand dollars of Iribe’s money as seed capital, Oculus VR was born.  Still short the money needed to finish an updated prototype, Luckey turned to a nascent strategy, crowdfunding. He launched a campaign on Kickstarter, seeking to raise $250,000 entirely, he assumed, from VR enthusiasts. “If I’m an investor, what are the odds that I’m going to want to invest in this product, no matter how cool it seems, when there’s such a precedent for virtual reality failing horribly?”  What followed was one of the most successful–and controversial–crowdfunding campaigns ever. Luckey offered everyone who paid at least $300 their own Rift prototype, which they could use to start making software for the platform. What he wasn’t offering: equity (selling stock via crowdfunding was still illegal). Luckey was raising money and seeding an ecosystem for the Rift, with no dilution necessary.  The Kickstarter leaped past the $250,000 mark in less than two hours. During the first day of the fundraiser Luckey was in Dallas, Tex. at the annual QuakeCon gaming convention, running demos of the Rift. “We didn’t have any signage, just a black table,” says Luckey. “And we had a line that was over two hours long the entire weekend. That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, man, this is gonna be huge. Ordinary people are interested in virtual reality, not just us crazy sci-fi nerds.’ ”  Within a month Luckey had raised $2.4 million from 9,522 backers, many of whom fumed after the giant Facebook sale. No matter. Virtual reality had become a startup reality. And Luckey, unlike many of his 30 Under 30 peers, saw his limitations as an executive. His seed investor, Brendan Iribe, became CEO. His most effective evangelist, John Carmack, eventually came on as CTO. (Carmack’s previous employer, ZeniMax, has sued Oculus, alleging that he brought over proprietary information; Oculus denies the claim.) Luckey’s title would simply be ‘founder,’ and he would continue in a grander, more general role, as the face of virtual reality.
The Oculus Rift has legitimized virtual reality. Now its inventor is 22 years old --and he's just getting started.