Palmer Luckey had not been born when The Lawnmower Man was released in 1992, but the movie, with its vision of computer-generated sensory immersion, helped seed his interest in virtual reality as soon as he saw it. He dreamed of playing video games in simulated 3-D worlds—a dream that led him to amass one of the world’s largest collections of head-mounted displays and, eventually, inspired him to attempt to make his own. With no formal engineering training, Luckey designed his first working prototype in his garage at the age of 16.

Today, the 21-year-old is the founder of Oculus VR, a company that is on the verge of releasing the Rift, an affordable virtual-reality headset for playing ultra-immersive video games. Facebook bought the company for $2 billion this spring.