Palmer Luckey built the first virtual reality headset of the modern era – then sold it to Facebook for $2bn. But he’s not sure the future of VR is with Mark Zuckerberg’s social media platform

Palmer Luckey has been waiting for this year his whole life. As a teenager, he collected obsolete virtual reality headsets from the original VR boom of the early 90s, using them as the basis for his own hacked together prototypes. Then, four years ago, he dropped out of California State University, founded Oculus and crowdfunded the Rift, the first modern-day VR head-mounted display (HMD) technology. This April, the device will get its long awaited launch – and it won’t be alone: the Samsung Gear VR arrived last year, while the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR headset will follow later in 2016.

“This is a huge year,” says Luckey. He’s at Microsoft’s Spring Xbox Showcase in San Francisco, introducing the forthcoming Oculus version of Minecraft. But as the figurehead of the current virtual reality boom, he’s happy to discuss the wider state of play. “This is the first year there will be mass market consumer VR,” he says. “It’s the first time there’s going to be a lot of developers actually selling VR software and getting feedback. But I don’t think 2016 is necessarily the year of virtual reality – it’s not going to instantly explode into mass popularity. It’s going to take time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The new Oculus Rift virtual reality headset on display in San Francisco. The device combines HD lenses with head tracking technologies to provide an immersive VR experience. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

Fortunately, Luckey has time – or at least money. The 2012 Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift secured almost $2.5m (£1.8m) in funding, and an investment round in December 2013 brought in $75m from VC firms. A year later, Facebook bought the company for $2bn. At first, the purchase caused a fair amount of surprise: Rift was seen by some as a novelty gaming peripheral – indeed, it was heavily marketed at gamers and the game development community. But Luckey always had his eye on bigger things.

“People have been watching science fiction and wanting virtual reality for decades,” he says. “There’s this idea of parallel digital worlds, where you can live, work, play and communicate. We have always known that VR isn’t just about games – in fact, that’s a very modern conception.”

Luckey sees the potential for a new form of communication – a way for people to meet and chat that’s more tangible than any other technological equivalent.

“Every form of digital communication is generally inferior to face-to-face communication,” he says. “There’s something you get by actually meeting people that you don’t get from email, text or phone. Virtual reality is the first technology that tries to make digital communication, not just more efficient or more useful, but more compelling and more human. That’s the promise of VR: the best of real world communication combined with the best of digital communication. It offers low cost, instantaneous accessibility, combined with the richness of human interaction.”

In this regard he sounds a lot like his boss (if that’s how $2bn tech buyouts work), Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder made a surprise appearance at February’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to talk about the company’s VR plans. “Pretty soon we’re going to live in a world where everyone has the power to share and experience whole scenes as if you’re right there in person,” he said. “Imagine being able to sit in front of a campfire and hang out with friends anytime you want. Or being able to watch a movie in a private theatre with your friends anytime you want.”

Zuckerberg seemed to be conflating two very different aspects of the virtual reality experience. One is the ability to watch 360-degree videos that put you inside specially filmed footage and allow you to look around, but not move or fully interact with the footage. The other is interactive virtual worlds that let you explore computer generated environments, either alone or with other people. Facebook already has the capacity to show 360-degree videos, but Luckey is unconvinced that this will be where we come for anything more immersive.

“The thing to remember is, Facebook the social networking tool as it exists today is not necessarily the future of VR,” he says. “Hanging around the virtual campfire isn’t what people do on Facebook today. Facebook is largely an asynchronous tool – even the company’s realtime Messenger and WhatsApp tools are still asynchronous in that generally people have to wait for replies. It’s the same thing with the news feed where you’re seeing hundreds of photos and status updates over a short period of time. That’s very different from virtual reality where you will be in an environment together synchronously.”

For Luckey, virtual reality is going to be about more in-depth, immersive experiences, rather than the dip in/dip out dynamic of today’s Facebook. Even if people start taking and sharing 360-degree film footage of their lives (which is becoming increasinly possible due to a growing range of cheap 360 cameras), Luckey thinks they won’t be sharing the super quick snippets we tend to see on social media today. “You’re not going to see someone’s VR status update and process it in half a second and keep scrolling,” he says. “You’re going to want to see real world captures in longer than five seconds – it’s totally different.

“360 degree video is going to get better and better to the point where it’s capturing full depth, full light fields, full sound fields, basically getting very close to actually capturing an actual event. It’s terrifying and great at the same time. For journalism, it’s going to be the first time in history where you’ll be able to effectively capture what actually happenined from all angles without framing it, without focusing on a specific thing. Being able to capture what is going in everywhere within a moment ... That’s not really existed before.”

And it’s not going to come to Facebook in that form? “I don’t think people should think ‘how will Facebook VR become a thing’,” he says. “Virtual reality will be social, but it’ll be on totally new platforms built from the ground up that really push VR, not necessarily applications we have today.”

One key issue Oculus has had to deal with this year is pricing. The headset will cost $699 or £499, when it arrives in April, and will require a reasonably powerful PC to run it at the framerates it requires to produce a seamless image and smooth head tracking. That’s quite some investment for a new hardware platform.

Luckey agrees. “The biggest obstacle for PC virtual reality isn’t the cost of the headset, it’s the cost of the PC,” he says. “If we lower the quality of our hardware and sell it for $400, that’s not actually going to broaden the audience that much because most people don’t have a PC capable of running VR yet. We either need to get people to buy those machines, or wait for the machines to catch up in power over the next few years.

“The other thing to remember is for that $600 you’re getting a lot of stuff. You’re getting multple LED displays, a high precision tracking system, very complex lenses ... You’re getting a lot more technology than $600 spent on pretty much any other device whether it’s a phone, TV or MP3 player. We’ve talked about the fact that we’re not making money on the hardware, we’re trying to sell this thing as affordable as we can and still provide a good VR experience.

“At the end of the day, we’re sold out until July – we’re exceeding all of our expectations. We’ve excited enough people. We made the right decision.”

Almost boyishly enthusiastic and unapologetically geeky, you wonder if some of Luckey’s raw passion for this technology will be dampened as the Oculus Rift becomes a commercial reality. It’s one thing to tinker with homebrew VR tech in your garage, it’s quite another to support that product into a competitive global marketplace. Is he still interested in virtual reality, now that it’s a multimillion dollar business?

“The things that inspired me five years ago are the same things that inspire me today,” he says. “It’s just that now it’s more obvious that this is going to take off.”

• Keith Stuart attended a press event in San Francisco, with travel and accommodation costs met by Microsoft