Virtual Luckey could be anywhere in the world, although he happens to be in the room next door, but we are interacting as if we were side by side.
Last year, Oculus was sold to social networking giant Facebook for US$2 billion ($2.96 billion), turning him into a millionaire. "I was 18 when I founded Oculus, but I had been working on VR for a few years before that," he tells me, as I emerge from virtual reality to join the real Hawaiian-shirted, flip-flop-wearing Luckey.
"It seemed like a super cool tech that made you feel like you were inside a game. So it was the combination of trying to find the best way to play a game, and my love of sci-fi which showed me all the crazy ideas of VR."
Virtual reality has been around for over two decades, used by everyone from the military to aerospace, to create an alternative reality inside the digital world.
"In 1987, Nasa Ames research centre in California snuck me in and put a headset and glove on me," says Professor Bob Stone, VR veteran and director of the University of Birmingham's Human Interface Technologies Team.
"I walked on to a very basic, wireframe graphic of an escalator in VR. I felt like I was going up even though my body was on the ground. I thought this has got to be the future."
Back in the 90s, Professor Stone used a 250,000 ($554,000) supercomputer to run virtual displays. Now, the technology is 10, fast and can run on a mobile phone.
The VR experience itself, which used to have a processing delay and cause nausea, is considerably better because computers are infinitely more powerful, motion sensors are more accurate, and displays have better resolution, Luckey points out.
"All the parts that made VR possible had been created by the mobile phone and games industries without anyone really noticing," he says.
Next year has already been branded the year of VR. Technology giants from Samsung to Facebook and Sony will launch their headsets; Samsung's Gear VR launched for mobile last month, while the simple 10 Google Cardboard can also give you basic VR experiences on your phone.
Facebook's Rift will launch early next year, followed by the HTC Vive and Sony's PlayStation VR in April. For all the headset makers, as Luckey confirms, the clear target market is serious gamers. But industries ranging from education to medicine, architecture and defence are applying the technology to patients, veterans, designers, submariners and students.
In one example, Psychology professor Skip Rizzo of the University of Southern California, who directs the Medical Virtual Reality lab, spends a lot of time with his patients in Iraq and Afghanistan - virtually.
Most patients he treats are war veterans who served in the Middle East. His lab, funded primarily by the United States military, has created 14 different virtual worlds - these can range from an Afghan village to a winding desert roadway, a busy market in Iraq, a crowded mosque, or a military checkpoint.
"We put them in a world most similar to the kind of experiences that they had when they were in combat, in their traumatic moments," Rizzo says. "Where they saw a person die, or if they killed someone or got blown up in a vehicle."
Rizzo has treated PTSD and trauma in veterans for over 20 years, but created his first virtual reality - Iraq - in 2004. His systems have been used to treat over 2000 veterans in hospital sites around the country, and are now being tailored to treat other sorts of trauma, such as the type experienced in the wake of terrorist attacks like the Paris bombings or the World Trade Centre tragedy.
Others in healthcare are using virtual reality to treat a range of medical conditions from phobias to phantom limb syndrome. Argentinian-American entrepreneur Fernando Tarnogol has founded Psytech, a company that has created a special VR environment to research and treat specific phobias and anxieties, such as agoraphobia, acrophobia, ornithophobia, claustrophobia, and others.
"We are dragging psychology kicking and screaming into the 21st century," Rizzo says. "This could be a real revolution in clinical care."
News reporters from the BBC to ABC News are trying out a new type of "immersive journalism" using virtual reality to bring the viewer right into a moment with them.
The military in the UK, US and even Europe is a major funder of virtual reality for applications ranging from training to recruitment. Since Professor Bob Stone joined the University of Birmingham in 2013, the defence stream has been his main funder.
"We have been involved in a range of projects like training submariners for the British Navy, to developing simulators to train soldiers about how to detect explosive devices."
Stone's small team even developed a simulator for the UK's bomb disposal robot Cutlass.
