I remember walking into an arcade at some theme park or other almost 20 years back and seeing a haphazard rig set up in the middle of the floor. Barely more than a monitor with wires pouring out of it and a cushioned chair, what drew people to stand in line and gawk from afar was the specialized helmet that was hooked up to the electrical system. I watched as people donned the helmet, grasped a controller, and swiveled their heads around while the monitor showed a 16-bit Doom environment swivel in unison. When it got to my turn, I strapped on the helmet with inexpressible joy, took up my controls, and gawked at the images, so close to my eyes that they were all I could see. Then a demon popped out of the hallway and killed me, and my turn was done. For that moment, though, even with the crappy, low-resolution graphics, I was inside the game. And it was glorious.

If you’re tech savvy or into video games at all, you’re probably familiar with Palmer Luckey’s company Oculus VR and its wildly successful Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift a few years back. Unlike every attempt ever over the past two decades to put together a compelling virtual reality system, the Oculus and its prototypes have generated a nearly messianic buzz in the gaming magazines and related circles. “It works,” they say.

Demos, which showcase seemingly simple concepts, like a simple flight simulator, or undersea exploration, or even the guillotine program that makes you feel like your head is being chopped off, are all eliciting haunted responses from everyone who tries them out. The ability of the gizmos to pump out the appropriate resomolutions (I’m not an engineer) are “ready,” they say. A consumer version will be released sometime this year, they say. The time is now.

Then Facebook went and bought it.

Now don’t get me wrong. You won’t catch my ever blaming Luckey and his crew for this. If Facebook offered me two billion freaking dollars for my right eyeball, I’d be like “Uh … sure?” It’s almost more money than there is money. They would have been fools not to sell. It seems entirely likely that the $2 billion number came around because they rejected lower, more reasonable numbers. And his crew is, of course, still in charge of designing and engineering the device. Plans are still very much in the works to keep the video gaming end of the device on track, even bolstered with the influx of new money, though some developers seem to be jumping ship as a result of the sale. The Rift is still their magnum opus, their baby. It’s just that now, if Facebook tells them the baby has to jump, they have to make it jump.

So what the heck does a social media giant want with virtual reality, anyway? Well, there’s a lot of speculation, but the company itself says they’re going to use it to facilitate communication in a way similar to Skype or Google+ Hangouts. You and your friends, who may be in disparate cities, states, countries, all put the headgear on and voila! You’re in a room together, or at the pyramids of Giza, or on the moon. “Sexting” is no more. Say hello to “Oculust.” (Okay, maybe that one won’t catch on.)

Facebook is trying to take an idea to make video gaming more immersive and turn it into something that may very well fundamentally change the way human beings interact with each other. Want to work from home? Put on your headset and sit in on daily meetings with corporate HQ seven states away. Want to sing your kids to sleep but have to be across the country on business? Done.

Video chat lets us do these things as well, but we all know the hassle of dealing with low-resolution cameras, limited view fields, and visual lag. Much like talking on the phone, it’s hard to “just hang out” in video chat. If you don’t have anything in particular to talk about, then it’s like you’re staring at a screen, with your friend or loved one’s distended face taking up three fourths of the viewing area, wondering if things are likely to get less awkward. With VR, maybe it’ll feel more like hanging around your dorm room with your old college friends, just shootin’ it and watching TV, or like you’re really there with your parents in Tulsa, joining them for breakfast.

Facebook evidently thinks these ideas are worth pursuing and put a hefty price tag on it accordingly. The downside to all this, of course, is the idea that they’re going to make it Facebook-y. Put 3D ads flashing obtrusively across your field of view, like in Minority Report. No one wants to see his mother’s forehead plastered with the Maalox logo.

The other thing is that, unlike with our smartphones, the Rift requires a certain separation from the world at large in order to operate. You really need to sit down somewhere without a lot of breakables nearby and try to stay calm, because your nervous system is going to start trying to react to the virtual environment. This means that it’s very hard to be “present” in the world of the headset and also in the actual, real world around you at the same time. Perhaps Facebook has ideas about augmented reality, like Google Glass is attempting to master, where you can see the real world with virtual information overlaid on top of it. Either way, splitting off focus from the real world into a virtual one is already a source of problems, as the incidence of car accidents due to texting while driving can attest.

Ultimately, whether Facebook’s plans for the Rift unfold the way they want, or for that matter, the way we want, remains to be seen. If it lives up to the hype, and the United States starts to make sensible decisions about its telecommunications industry to keep up with demand for service, then we may all be talking about it in Middle Earth in a few years. Or Tatooine. Or Paris or something, for you not-nerds. Cheers.