The first time Brendan Iribe arranged a meeting with Palmer Luckey, the teenage Luckey showed up at the upscale steakhouse in flip-flops, shorts and an Atari T-shirt. What he didn’t have was the virtual reality demonstration Iribe had hoped to see.

So they talked instead.

Despite first impressions, Iribe soon after wrote a personal check for several thousand dollars to buy parts for the virtual reality goggles Luckey wanted to make.

“He could have run away with it if he wanted,” Iribe recalled.

In the 20 months since then, the Irvine-based company the two formed – Oculus VR – has shipped 60,000 pairs of its Rift virtual reality goggles to developers around the world and beefed up its executive team with some of the biggest names in video gaming technology.

This week, Luckey and Iribe are expected to reveal details surrounding the next generation of the goggles to the media and game developers at a conference in San Francisco.

Iribe is first to admit there are still challenges ahead in turning the Rift into a comfortable, high-quality consumer product that can ship at mass-market scale. And those developers need to pump out the apps, games, educational tools and virtual worlds that would make the goggles worth their current $300 price tag.

Still, getting this far this fast is a testament to the money, patience and planning that Iribe devoted to the project, which is the closest any company has come yet to making virtual reality a commercial reality.

As with many tech ventures, the Oculus partnership is a story of a young visionary guided by someone who’s been through the startup mill.

SEED MONEY MADE EARLY

Iribe’s money and experience came from the same place. When he was Luckey’s age he started Scaleform, a software company that made video game interfaces. He built it up to a $36 million acquisition by Autodesk in 2011.

Then Iribe took members of his core team, who had been college classmates in Maryland, to Aliso Viejo’s Gaikai, where they got to work building a cloud-based gaming platform. Sony bought Gaikai in 2012 for $380 million.

Some of Iribe’s Scaleform money went into Oculus. Iribe became CEO and took an evenly split ownership stake in the new company with Luckey. Scaleform partners Nate Mitchell and Michael Antonov also put in money and got founder’s stock.

Early on, Iribe convinced Luckey not to take a job offer working on someone else’s vision of virtual reality. Then he talked him out of inviting friends over with little more than the lure of pizza to help him ship out stripped-down kits to VR aficionados.

A STEADY PACE

The problem with that plan was that the goggles wouldn’t have come loaded with software that programmers could use to create VR experiences. Those VR apps – like the apps that sparked the smartphone boom – will become the reason people buy consumer VR in time, assuming they do.

A few days after taking Iribe’s check, Luckey sent him an email: “Thanks for convincing me out of my rationalizations.”

Iribe’s style is to underpromise to outsiders, overdeliver and be upfront about challenges. He sees it as a matter of building trust.

“Oculus continues to set expectations at the right place,” Iribe said. “Not overhype, or oversell anything. This is not going to happen overnight.”

This week, Iribe and Luckey will be among the team presenting to media outlets and game developers at the high-profile Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Oculus hasn’t said what improvements it might show nor has it offered a firm timeline for shipping a consumer version of its goggles.

BIG SHOW PLANNED

However, the company has stopped production on its initial development kit, called DK1 by developers. Iribe has said previously that Oculus would ship DK2 to developers with improved features in advance of the consumer version, or CV1.

Oculus has signed up for floor space at the biggest game conference of the year, E3 in June in Los Angeles – exactly two years after the world got its first glimpse of Luckey’s goggles at the same event. Giants such as Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft typically use the conference to take the wraps off new game consoles.

With the help of a $75 million infusion the company received in December, Iribe’s team recently started locking up exclusive content for the Rift, including a VR spaceship dogfighting experience made by the people behind the long-running massively multiplayer online game “Eve.”

Lately, Iribe’s team has been showing the Rift gear privately to people such as Markus Persson, the creator of “Minecraft,” and Alfonso Cuarón, the director the Oscar-winning space thriller “Gravity.”

Little more than selfies and vague teases ever make it from these people onto public forums. “Yeah, I need to get back into Oculus Rift development,” Persson tweeted after a meeting last week.

KEY DEMO MADE A MARK

One of these trusted demos went to Web pioneer and powerhouse investor Marc Andreessen and his partners at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz late last year. The version Andreessen saw no longer suffered from the first kit’s limitations. It featured improved resolution and (largely) solved simulator sickness, which was caused by what a wearer sees not matching up perfectly with what his body feels.

“It’s always been the elephant in the room,” Iribe said of that problem.

Oculus arrived at the improvement by way of collaborative research with Bellevue, Wash.-based game developer Valve. Iribe has since hired Atman Binstock from Valve and put him in charge of research out of a new office in Seattle.

When Andreessen took the improved prototype off his head, he turned to video game legend John Carmack – whom Iribe had hired as chief technology officer – and asked how big a deal the Rift would be.

Carmack, who created the iconic ’90s game “Doom” and whose word carries a lot of weight in his industry, said it would be huge.

Not long after, Oculus had $75 million in the bank.

“If we get it right, we’re confident millions of consumers around the world will enjoy it,” Iribe said.