Facial recognition, sword battles, and VR selfie sticks—Facebook VR looks wild.

Facebook in VR: It's certainly coming, and company founder Mark Zuckerberg took the wraps off it for the first time at this year's Oculus Connect conference. Zuckerberg took the stage at the VR conference's keynote presentation on Thursday to talk about the future of Facebook, then donned an Oculus Rift headset, grabbed the system's upcoming Touch hand controllers, and began demonstrating a surprisingly robust system full of voice chat, facial expressions, and direct ties to the Facebook ecosystem.

The five-minute demonstration of the still-unnamed Facebook VR experience began with two other Facebook employees appearing as cartoony avatars on the same stage Zuckerberg was standing on. These characters were different from the new "Oculus Avatar" system announced later in the presentation; FB VR's avatars had a more Mii-like style to let Facebook users present themselves in systems like virtual reality. (Oculus Avatars will launch alongside Oculus Touch "later this year.")

The demo appeared to track users' faces to show off smiles, open mouths, and detailed expressions, and the results looked loaded with emotion and human nuance. (Update: Facebook reached out to clarify that the demo's facial expressions were controlled by button presses, not facial analysis. "Eventually, the goal is to achieve most of what you saw today through gestural tracking and voice analysis," Facebook told Ars in a statement.)

The demo saw every chat room member interacting with a virtual smartwatch. That menu interface allowed chatters to bring up new virtual locales to stand in, share videos, take webcam calls from non-VR participants, and more. Zuckerberg and friends played a few simple games, including chess, cards, and sword fighting—and one of the chatters was able to draw his own sword, then immediately pick it up and fight with it. Zuckerberg later took a Facebook Messenger video call from his wife, who appeared as a giant screen that could be moved and scaled around the chat room. Zuckerberg eventually took a selfie inside the VR interface with his wife's video display (and he used a virtual selfie stick to take the shot). He immediately posted that selfie to his personal Facebook feed.

The demo didn't come with an official name or a launch date, but it did represent the first major project to connect Facebook's full social feature set to Oculus, the company Facebook purchased in 2014 for $2 billion. A smaller-scale Oculus/Facebook app launched for the Samsung GearVR earlier this year to connect game players to multiplayer sessions.