Minutes after Facebook announced plans to buy virtual reality firm Oculus VR in March, the jokes began popping up on Twitter. "Just checking my Facebook news feed!" the messages read, accompanied by photos of people in unwieldy, Facebook-branded Oculus Rift headsets.

It was amusing because the people in the photos looked ridiculous sporting the bulky Rift, but the jokes highlight a persistent problem: The equipment needed to make VR a reality is not as cool as the technology behind it.

In a video titled "The Faces of Morpheus," Sony recorded attendees at this year's E3 trying out its new Project Morpheus virtual reality headset. And although those who experimented with it seemed impressed, they still looked like goobers stabbing the air with Play controllers, trying to fight off virtual sharks.

Facebook doesn't seem too concerned with the VR cool factor, and it is making a $2 billion bet that it is actually the next big thing in technology. But can manufacturers find that sweet spot between amazing technology and stunning equipment to match? And can your stomach handle the ride? Oculus, Sony, and even Google are hoping the answer is yes.

Escaping Reality

Though it's made a lot of headlines recently, virtual reality is nothing new. One of the first devices dates back to 1962, when Morton Heilig unveiled the Sensorama (below). People would sit in a chair and stick their faces inside a display that covered the top and sides of their heads to see, smell, and feel the action going on inside.

VR became a bit more portable a few years later when Ivan Sutherland developed what is considered to be the first head-mounted display. Wearing it was still a slightly precarious endeavor, though. According to the Association for Computing Machinery, Sutherland's headset was jokingly called The Sword of Damocles because it was suspended from the ceiling above the user's head.

Until the mid 1980s, virtual reality was largely used and developed by federal agencies like NASA and the military for flight training simulators. The term "virtual reality" didn't really emerge until the late 1980s, when it was coined by Jaron Lanier, a former Atari employee who cofounded VPL Research to push VR tech forward. The company foundered, but the concept picked up steam going into the 1990s.

In fact, when you think of virtual reality these days, you probably think of the 1990s—and the many movies that tried to depict it (see slideshow below). The Lawnmower Man, Brainscan, Strange Days, and more didn't exactly paint a consumer-friendly picture of VR, but since when has a little danger deterred people from trying out exciting new gadgets?

One of the first times the general public got to try out VR was in British arcades in 1991 thanks to the Virtuality 1000CS. The headset was massive—you kind of looked like you had a vacuum cleaner strapped to your head—but in the pre-Internet era, it was likely an amazing ride. But it didn't quite take the tech world by storm, and neither did much of anything else.

As we focused our attention on the Web and portable computing devices, VR largely took a backseat to other, more affordable innovations and was viewed as more of a novelty than something for our living rooms.

The VR Race Heats Up

The tide started to turn in 2012, when the Oculus Rift nabbed $2.4 million in funding on Kickstarter by promising a "truly immersive gaming experience."

"Most products either lack the technical features required for believable immersion or sit at a very high price-point ($20,000+) reserved for the military or scientific community," Oculus VR wrote on its Kickstarter page. "We set out to change all that with the Rift, which is designed to maximize immersion, comfort, and pure, uninhibited fun, at a price everyone can afford."

Oculus only sought to raise $250,000 with that 2012 campaign, but ultimately brought in $2,437,429. A year later, it secured another $16 million investment from Spark Capital and Matrix Partners, before achieving the biggest windfall of all: a $2 billion Facebook acquisition.

Thus far, the Oculus Rift is just a dev kit meant for software developers to create software for a future consumer version of the device. A second-gen version was released at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this year, dubbed DK2, and in a brief hands-on with the device, PCMag.com found it to be "much more mature system than it was a year ago."