Fiddling with electronics in the camper trailer where he was living in his parents’ driveway, teenager Palmer Luckey made a connection that just might change the world.

Luckey is captivated with technology and, in particular, virtual reality. VR was pervasive in stories throughout his childhood.

The ’90s began with go-anywhere adventures inside “Star Trek’s” holodeck and closed with “The Matrix.” In between came “The Lawnmower Man,” “Strange Days” and other tales framed around the possibilities and implications of a technology that could substitute reality for one made of cyberspace.

“ ‘The Matrix’ was a big inspiration,” Luckey, now 21, recalls. “A very cool film that left a big impact on me.”

The masses, alas, got iPods instead of VR. But what Luckey saw that night as a teen – the dots his singularly focused mind connected as he hacked together electronic components – led to a technology that’s now farther along than any previous attempt at making virtual reality real.

Earlier this month, the company Luckey founded, Oculus VR, left Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show with more buzz than giants like Sony, Samsung or Intel. It has shipped close to 50,000 developer kits for its prototype VR goggles, and received rave reviews for its newest version.

“Oculus has created a device that may usher in an era of truly immersive gaming and entertainment,” said techie website Engadget, in naming it the best gadget of CES. Business Insider was even more gushing: “Mere Words Can’t Do Justice To How Awesome The New Oculus Rift Gaming Headset Is – And I Don’t Even Like Video Games.”

In December, the Irvine-based company got a vote of confidence in the form of $75 million from powerhouse Silicon Valley investors, including Web pioneer Marc Andreessen. Shortly before that, its credibility was bolstered by the addition of a video gaming pioneer as chief technology officer.

“They’re closer to (broad consumerization) than I’ve ever seen in 20 years,” says Greg Welch, professor at the University of Central Florida and chair of last year’s IEEE virtual reality conference.

MELTING PLASTIC

It all started with Luckey, who was home-schooled in Long Beach by his stay-at-home mom, Julie. That afforded him plenty of time to do things like melt plastic using a 9-volt battery and a paper clip – a trick he learned before the age of 5.

He’s been making things ever since. There are no electricians in the family. His father, Brett, sells cars.

Luckey started doing freelance computer repair work as a teenager. He repaired broken Nintendo handhelds and sold them on eBay at a $50 profit.

That funded the purchase of old VR gear and components to build high-powered gaming PCs. The VR gear had been used for things like NASA or military training and originally cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Luckey was able to snag it at government liquidation sales for a fraction of the old price.

When the iPhone came out in 2007, his ability to make cash by repairing gadgets multiplied. He would buy boxes of broken phones and mix and match the working components to make whole, fixed ones.

“In one year I tallied it up in PayPal; I spent about $36,000 on virtual reality and PC gaming hardware and I made more than that fixing and selling iPhones,” Luckey says.

Luckey was piecing together custom VR head-mounted display designs in 2009. He wanted small, high-resolution displays that he could line up alongside each other to provide images for each eye, producing a 3D image. Nothing was small enough or high-resolution enough, though.

The idea was if you put screens directly in front of your eyes, and used the low-cost sensors for tracking movement that were in iPhones and Android phones, you could get an image that would change based on where you tilted your head.

In a video game such as “Halo” or “Call of Duty,” the image players see on a screen is a camera’s view into a virtual world. But strap the screen to your head and your eyes become the camera, with the impression that you’ve been transported into another world.

Everything changed when Luckey got his hands on a particular screen from an ultra-mobile laptop PC, the Fujitsu-U810. It packed more than 1 million pixels into a space just over 5 inches across. Rather than buying a whole computer, Luckey realized he could buy several replacement screens for hundreds each, allowing him to experiment.

EUREKA MOMENT

The old VR headsets Luckey had been buying all specified a number that represented the distance between someone’s pupils. That interpupillary distance, or IPD, is important if you want to create a 3D image by showing something for each eye. On average, that distance is about 60 millimeters or so.

“So I’ve been seeing this number over and over again. Default IPD 64 millimeters. Default IPD 60 millimeters. Adjustable between 55 and 75 millimeters. So I kind of had that number just stuck in my head,” he says.

What Luckey noticed that night in his trailer was that the specification sheet for the Fujitsu-U810’s screen said the active area was 121 millimeters across.

“I sat there and I was like, ‘Huh, that’s a weird number,’ ” he says. “That is almost exactly double human interpupillary distance. So that means you could basically – you could take the left eye’s image and put it on the left half of the screen and the right side on the right half of the screen.”

He thought about it for a few minutes, whether the approach could actually work and how it could be adjusted, and then ran to his garage to build it.

Now, he really had something.

A single, relatively inexpensive, super-high-resolution screen showing two images, one for each eye, could produce 3D imagery that would make snowflakes appear to fall before your eyes, or a volcano tower overhead.

Luckey built multiple prototypes, burning out screens along the way as he modified the units – ripping off the sturdy metal frame and replacing it with lighter plastic so it didn’t unnecessarily weigh down your head. He went through at least 10 of the panels.

“I built a lot of different prototypes,” he recalls.

JOB OR COMPANY?

Luckey contacted Mark Bolas at USC, who runs a lab that explores ideas of mixing realities and worked with head-mounted displays for decades. Luckey purchased old gear from Bolas and had questions about how to find parts and how to pursue a career in VR. Bolas hired him as a lab technician in August 2011.

Luckey kept evolving his “Rift” VR prototypes and burning out Fujitsu-U810 screens. In early 2012, he was toying with the idea of raising development funds on the Kickstarter crowdfunding website. He thought he could sell a kit for people to put together their own VR goggles.

Meanwhile, he was trading notes on a VR Internet forum with John Carmack, a gaming pioneer who had helped launch the first-person genre with “Doom.” Carmack was tearing apart a Sony head-mounted display in Texas and Luckey offered him some thoughts. Carmack offered to buy one of Luckey’s kits; the teen sent him one gratis.

“He’s too awesome of a guy to sell anything to so I told him I would just lend it to him for free,” Luckey says. “He got it and integrated it with his stuff and had some good things to say about it.”

Carmack also had some thoughts on Luckey’s Kickstarter plan.

“There’s not very many people who know how to build these things and there are a lot of software developers who are desperately going to want to play with a device like this,” Carmack said, as Luckey recalls. “So if you’re gonna sell a kit you need to have some kind of option, even if it’s a lot more expensive, to have something pre-built. Because people are gonna love this.”

GO IT ALONE?

That summer in 2012, Carmack took Luckey’s headset to E3 in Los Angeles, the largest gaming convention of the year, and called it the “best VR demo for this type of thing ever made.”

After Carmack’s endorsement, buyout and job offers started rushing in.

“It was ranging from major companies that have not done VR before all the way to companies that had been doing virtual reality since the ‘90s,” Luckey says.

He was still trying to figure out what to do when he was invited by Brendan Iribe to a dinner at a steakhouse in Los Angeles. Iribe was chief product officer at Aliso Viejo-based cloud-gaming company Gaikai, which was being bought by Sony for $380 million, and was looking for something new.

Luckey had an idealized VR experience in mind and wasn’t interested in tweaking someone else’s gadget. He formed a limited liability corporation and, on July 4, gave Iribe a firsthand demo of the Rift.

After looking through the goggles, Iribe wanted in. Palmer knew hardware, Iribe knew software, and together they saw an opportunity to make a mainstream VR product. Iribe invested in Oculus and came on as CEO.

THE FUTURE OF VR

At CES last month, the new goggle prototype – named Crystal Cove, after Orange County’s iconic beach, and using a new panel technology – demonstrated better movement tracking and visuals. Now you can lean forward or to the sides to peer around corners, instead of just moving your head.

Now the company is focusing on producing a consumer version.

For a time, Luckey was doing everything in the company. Now, as it grows, he’s back to playing with the hardware and “people who are better at things like business and customer support do those things instead.”

Luckey is familiar with the way most fictional depictions of futuristic technology turn out. He’s more optimistic than that.

“It’s really funny how VR has so much potential for doing great things,” he says. “So much potential for changing humanity for the better. Yet all the science fiction that’s written about it basically positions it as this world-ending dystopian technology that will ruin humanity.

“I feel like that’s unfair to it. I think it’s going to be a net positive effect and it’s going to do a lot of good things, and that if bad things do happen, they’ll be far outweighed by the good.”

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