I still have a hacked Power Glove and (stolen) portable TV and Fresnel lens glued to a pair of swim goggles in a box somewhere. I made them when I was... somewhere in middle school from instructions someone posted on Usenet, and spent the better part of a summer learning C and trying to make a haunted house in Avril. I don't think virtual reality is going to end up being a profound technology anymore, but I still love that stuff for giving me the sense that The Future was a thing you could hack together in your garage rather than waiting for someone to sell it to you, and that I needed to because I sure couldn't afford to buy it. That wasn't true either, of course, technologists are very much beholden to capital just like everyone else, but it's good bullshit to have believed once.