Oculus is mum on when it will ship a version for consumers, hinting that its target is next year.

If the company is successful, it will have a lot to do with Palmer Luckey, the 20-year-old founder of the company, who seems to have wandered out of a casting call for unconventional, young technology entrepreneurs. He pads around his office in bare feet, munching on cookies. He refuses a chair during a meeting, preferring to sit cross-legged on the floor.

Mr. Luckey was a home-schooled teenager living with his parents in Long Beach, Calif., when he began collecting virtual reality headsets, a habit he financed by fixing broken iPhones and Nintendo DS’s in his garage and reselling them at a profit. Mr. Luckey estimates he spent $32,000 on headsets in one year alone, about 45 of which he now has in his collection.

While he was passionate about virtual reality, Mr. Luckey realized that none of the headsets he bought offered the kind of immersive experience he wanted from the technology. He began tinkering with headset designs of his own. Last summer, he paid a visit to Mr. Bolas at U.S.C., who hired him on the spot to help out with virtual reality projects at the university’s mixed reality lab, a research group financed largely by the Defense Department.

“If there had been a perfect headset, I wouldn’t have gotten into virtual reality,” Mr. Luckey said.

Mr. Luckey’s biggest break came when he struck up an online conversation last year with John Carmack, the game programmer behind Doom and Quake. He sent a prototype of the Oculus Rift, which used Oakley ski goggle straps and was held together by silver duct tape, to Mr. Carmack, who took it to the E3 games conference and used it to demonstrate one of his games to a small group of attendees.

People who put the headset on were amazed by how the game world surrounded them. It has a 110-degree field of view, far more expansive than the 40 degrees of many virtual reality headsets.