SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook has agreed to acquire virtual reality trailblazer Oculus VR in a $2 billion deal announced Tuesday, and of all the acquisitions the social network has ever made, this will undoubtedly prove the most influential. Its effects will reverberate throughout the VR market and far beyond, to the edges of personal computing that we can only now conceptualize.

People do have reason to criticize the deal. Oculus was an open-source darling, a Kickstarter-funded startup, and a game luminary magnet that could seemingly do no wrong, CNET News.Com reported. And any move from a behemoth corporation — let alone the seemingly privacy-averse social network overlord — is going to be met with harsh backlash. Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson has been one of the most vocal.

“I did not chip in 10 grand to seed a first investment round to build value for a Facebook acquisition,” Persson wrote on his personal blog in a post titled “Virtual reality is going to change the world” soon after announcing, on word of the deal, that he had nixed a Minecraft VR port for Oculus. The Kickstarter debacle — in which Oculus received $2.4 million in what were essentially donations for what would become a nearly 100,000 percent valuation jump — is a totally different story worth exploring on in its right.

But this isn’t just about Facebook and Oculus, the same as it’s not just about gaming. Facebook made a long-shot bet, as my colleague Jennifer Van Grove explains, on what is essentially a science fiction-inspired future in which virtual experiences could aspire to be as real to us — experienced as smoothly through sensory projection — as the physical world.

This acquisition, while great for Facebook if Oculus remains the preeminent player in VR — is more important for the applications of the technology in the mainstream. Virtual reality was going to happen regardless. Now, the tech is going to become more powerful, the market more diverse, and the acceleration of the entire space faster than ever before.

“We’re a rocket,” Brendan Iribe, Oculus co-founder and CEO, told The Verge, “and we just attached ourselves to an even bigger rocket to get it out there and deliver a better virtual reality experience to the world.”

The oft-repeated talking point in the wake of a landmark acquisitions typically manifests itself in the form of “What X will get from X.” In this case, it’s abundantly clear that both Facebook and Oculus will benefit enormously from each other.

Oculus gets a juggernaut in the tech industry whose aims, though more intangible, are as lofty as Google’s: Connect everyone, understand the world, build the knowledge economy, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is happy to robotically recite.

Oculus is happily drinking the Kool-Aid. “Facebook understands the potential for VR. Mark and his team share our vision for virtual reality’s potential to transform the way we learn, share, play, and communicate,” reads Oculus’ official statement, signed off on by creator and co-founder Palmer Luckey, Iribe, and industry legend John Carmack, the creator of Doom who joined the team last year. “This partnership is one of the most important moments for virtual reality: it gives us the best shot at truly changing the world.”

“We’re clearly not a hardware company. We’re not going to make a profit off the devices. Long-term we see this as a software and services thing.”

On the other end, Facebook is doing its best to stem the flood of negativity and reassure us that Oculus will still be Oculus for the time being, with a focus on gaming because “it’s the furthest along,” meaning the most commercially viable.

“We’re clearly not a hardware company. We’re not going to make a profit off the devices. Long-term we see this as a software and services thing,” Zuckerberg said on a conference call after the announcement. Take that at face value of course, but there’s no foreseeable reason Facebook would tamper with the company’s original road map. Making VR cheaper and easier, and giving its most promising poster child a resource arsenal, only helps Facebook in the future.

Because what Facebook gets out of the acquisition equation, the flip side of the relationship, is a chance to put one of the earliest, and biggest, marks on a market that will transform industries five and 10 years down the line. “Today’s acquisition is a long-term bet on the future of computing,” Zuckerberg said.