“Why shouldn’t people be able to teleport wherever they want?” asks Palmer Luckey, the 22-year-old founder of Oculus VR, the virtual-reality company that Facebook bought last year for more than $2 billion. Teleportation isn’t happening anytime in the near future, of course. What Mr. Luckey has in mind is virtual travel, whether to Hawaii or Paris or to a corporate conference room for a meeting.

He is addressing concerns about virtual reality over a video conference call from his company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. “A lot of people think that virtual reality’s ultimate conclusion is something like ‘The Matrix,’” he says, referring to the 1999 film about a dystopian future in which enslaved humans unknowingly live in a simulated world created by machines. “The point isn’t to copy the practical realities of the real world,” he says. “It’s to try to do things how we would do them if we didn’t have any physical laws governing how we do them.” People are not “going to use virtual reality to simulate walking around the parking lot.”

In June, Oculus announced the launch of its first consumer product, the Rift headset, which will allow users to play videogames, watch movies and explore virtual worlds with 360-degree vision. The headset is expected to cost less than $1,500 when it appears in early 2016, including a computer that can run it. Last week, the company released its second virtual-reality film, a cartoon called “Henry” that viewers will be able to watch on the Rift. (The release was intended to inspire others to start making similar films.) Viewers can immerse themselves in the movie and watch the action unfold from any angle they like.

The Rift headset will enter a growing market of virtual-reality consumer products, from a basic $25 cardboard viewer that works with a smartphone to a $200 Samsung headset. Sony has also announced the 2016 release of a virtual-reality headset that connects to its PlayStation 4. At this point, Mr. Luckey says, virtual-reality headsets are still a luxury item. “Until it reaches that critical mass, it’s a good thing to have, but not necessary,” he says. He expects that in about 10 years, the headsets (or perhaps lighter versions, like sunglasses) will be fairly widespread among consumers.

Despite his youth, Mr. Luckey can point to long experience working with this technology. Born in Long Beach, Calif., he grew up being home-schooled by his mother. His father worked at a car dealership. He became interested in virtual reality after reading science fiction books and watching movies like “The Matrix.” For him, he says, “it was one of those technologies that’s up there with flying cars and artificial intelligence and time travel.”