Age: 22

Job: Founder of Irvine-based Oculus VR

Bio: Luckey is a Long Beach native who founded Oculus, a virtual reality company acquired by Facebook this year for $2 billion.

Why he’s an influencer: The self-taught engineer created the Oculus Rift headset, which immerses users in virtual worlds. In 2012, he raised $2.4 million from more than 9,500 supporters on Kickstarter. Luckey caught the attention of wealthy backers and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Under Facebook, the Rift is no longer being marketed as just a gaming tool but as a new way for people to interact with friends and loved ones and have unique experiences.

Biggest challenges: A consumer version of the goggles has yet to be released. Luckey and his Oculus clan need to maintain momentum from their early success and stave off competitors. Sony, for instance, is developing its own goggles.

Work philosophy: “There is a lot more travel and PR than I expected. I usually prefer to sit in my lab and work on hardware!” wrote Luckey, answering a question in a Reddit discussion board.

Thoughts on the field of gaming: “I think, as time goes on, the games industry is going to branch out into a lot of these other areas,” says Luckey in a video posted in November on Smithsonianmag.com. “Like, education is going to be a huge one. (So will) emergency responder training, big-data visualization, especially on things when you can share a model instantly between spaces across the world. It’s going to touch pretty much every industry you can imagine.” (He was awarded a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award this year for youth achievement.)

Inspiration: “‘The Matrix’ was a big inspiration,” Luckey told the Register in January 2014. “A very cool film that left a big impact on me.”

What’s next: There’s no clear date on when consumers can get their hands on Oculus headsets, though company CEO Brendan Iribe hinted in a recent conference that it may be “many months” away.

More business influencers: Bob Olson, Scott Samuelsen, Frank Talarico, Barry Arbuckle, Noel Massie, Teresa Mercado-Cota, Shaheen Sadeghi, Lucy Dunn, Ada Briceño, Tony Moiso, Bill Gross, Daniel Ivascyn, Andrea Young, Emile Haddad, Donald Bren, David Pyott, Leonard Chan

View the full list: 100 people who influenced Orange County in 2014