If 25-year-old Richard Emms is in the vanguard of a new art form, a virtual trip he created for people to travel to the International Space Station is one of the first exhibits.

Emms created an interactive model of the space station as a playable video game in preparation for his master’s thesis in interactive media at USC last year. By Monday night, Emms, now in his last semester, was showing off a peaceful, if vertigo-inducing, trip inside the Oculus Rift virtual reality goggles.

“Even for me at the time, VR was still out of the picture,” Emms said of his class last February. “Once I saw what you could do with it and what people had done with it, I was completely convinced. Even in my spare time, I’d be happy to just make stuff” for virtual reality.

Emms was one of about 150 virtual reality enthusiasts meeting up Monday night at visual effects studio Digital Domain in Los Angeles.

The venue – a studio where actors’ performances are captured for movies like “Ender’s Game” and “A Christmas Carol” – proved too small for the first meeting of VR fans of its size in the Los Angeles area. At least 100 people were turned away from VRLA, which was being held two weeks after the field got a big boost with Facebook’s $2 billion purchase of Irvine-based Oculus and its Rift goggles.

While the uninitiated wonder why Facebook would pay so much for a startup that hasn’t proven itself commercially, the visual effects designers, game creators, writers and editors who gathered Monday have no doubts.

They regularly strap $300 screens to their faces and dive into what they see as the next – perhaps the final – medium for human expression and communication.

Emms’ demonstration was one of about half a dozen interactive experiences on display.

Garrett Watts, a creator of videos for comedy website Funny or Die, wondered how you might create jokes – where timing is everything – in a completely immersive medium where people can choose where to look.

“I’ll just start writing the jokes for this stuff,” said Stewart Burns, a writer for “The Simpsons” who was wearing wireless goggles that made him feel like he was riding virtually in a hot air balloon, while being led around the room by his daughters in the real world. “In 10 years, we’ll just put these on after work.”

Cory Strassburger, one half of the two-man team behind VR experience company Kite & Lightning, discussed how many cameras are needed to capture a performer’s actions with enough detail to translate into something that feels three-dimensional in cyberspace.

Philip Rosedale, founder of virtual world Second Life, stood in front of a laptop equipped with a specialized camera made by a company Apple recently bought. When he smiled and tilted his head, a cartoon avatar on screen did the same thing.

Rosedale’s year-old company, High Fidelity, has fewer than a dozen employees. It already holds meetings virtually, powered by the ability to see each other’s facial expressions and body language.

“I consider it like the iPhone and the first wave of apps,” said 31-year-old Anaheim resident and serial entrepreneur Dylan Watkins. “Nobody really understands it.”

Ted Schilowitz, formerly of high-end Irvine camera maker Red Digital and now a tech consultant in Hollywood, couldn’t make it to the virtual reality meeting Monday because he was demonstrating a three-sided immersive theater experience at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas.

But the VR crowd wanted Schilowitz to speak anyway, so he exited a Las Vegas theater after the show ended and answered a video call from 19-year-old USC student and event organizer Cosmo Scharf.

Schilowitz called the wrap-around theatrical experience, known as Escape, “the gateway drug to VR.”

“Pretty soon we’ll be able to do this Rift to Rift,” he said through a pane of glass to people who weren’t physically with him.

“Facebook now owns the future of communications and the Internet itself,” Scharf said in his opening remarks. “The Internet will be a place you can go to.”

As for Emms, he’s now working part-time at Oculus. He starts Wednesday.

“It’s so weird,” he said.

Contact the writer: 949-229-2426 or ihamilton@ocregister.com