Up until now, crowdfunding schemes have had one main pitfall: that even though you prepaid for something, you might not get it. Now, with Facebook’s purchase of Oculus VR, a pitfall has emerged on the other end of the success spectrum: that the thing you bought might evolve into something that maybe you wouldn’t have prepaid for in the first place.

The Oculus Rift headset was one of the biggest early success stories on Kickstarter. Virtual Reality is one of those never-was technology dreams, but Oculus’s promise was enough for backers to go for it in droves. It wasn’t just promise either: there was plenty of intelligence behind the Rift headset, and it seemed to keep improving as the months went by, with new versions of the development kit and some highly impressive game demos.

And then yesterday Facebook went and bought Oculus VR for $2 billion. This has not gone down particularly well in the technology press, either because the deal is a betrayal of Oculus’s indie roots, or simply because it makes no sense. Facebook, a company with a major games presence, albeit one that’s hardly on the cutting edge, seems to be buying into Oculus because it sees VR as a new field opening up, and with the recent announcement of Sony’s Project Morpheus, it might be right.

Still, the argument that the purchase doesn’t make much sense is a strong one. Unless Mark Zuckerberg has bought into the notion of The Matrix and sees it as the logical end point of Facebook’s parallel world of social connections, it’s not easy to guess where he’s heading with this. VR headsets may be providing increasingly realistic experiences, but they’re still bulky and obvious—only suited for home use, when you’re alone with a net connection. Vain hope it may be, but I don’t really want things to go that way.

Where VR headsets might be heading can be seen in the convergence of technologies. VR headsets replace reality with something new, which is perfect for games but isolates the user from the world around them. Augmented Reality headsets like Google Glass take the world the user is already in and layers extra information over it. Right now they’re limited in their application, but as they become more sophisticated, the tweaks they make to reality will become increasingly indistinguishable from the real thing. At some point, AR and VR are going to merge, and the choice of just how much of the real world to occlude is going to be left to the user.

With high-definition displays, motion tracking and fast response times, VR headsets are approaching the point where they can deliver a genuinely immersive experience. AR headsets are already extremely lightweight, and you don’t have to look too far in the future to see them being implanted in contact lenses. So maybe this is where Facebook is looking with its purchase of Oculus VR—not the immediate future of immersive gaming but rather the long-term play of a future in which your social world is always with you.

This could yet turn out well for everyone: Facebook certainly (?) isn’t stupid enough to kill off Oculus’s promise as something new in the world of gaming. The goodwill that the company gained over the course of its Kickstarter campaign and subsequently is gone already, but some of it could be clawed back if the hardware and its software ecosystem meet early hopes. Longer term, and more scarily, we might yet be facing a future where Facebook is always in the corner of your eye. That may not be a “Like” button that many are willing to click.