On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the Oculus Connect conference in San Jose, Calif. with a virtual reality demo which included nifty ways to socialize in virtual reality.

In the demo, Mark and a couple of friends visit various virtual arenas, including the bottom of the ocean, the surface of Mars, Facebook's offices, and even Zuckerberg's home (complete with his dog, Beast).

Besides chatting (with new, animated and more life-like avatars), the trio engaged in other activities, such as playing a card game and fencing. In one particularly cool moment, one of the participants of the VR call draws his own sword. By that I mean draws it, with a virtual pen, in the air and then wields it.

Of course, just like in Zuckerberg's VR demo from this year's F8 conference, the presentation ends with him taking a virtual selfie with a virtual selfie stick. Compared to that demo, which was impressive in its own right, the latest one felt much more polished. However it is still very experimental. There's no mention of an app yet and we reckon that is much further down the tracks.

At the conference, Facebook introduced a new, wire-free variant of Oculus Rift, currently in development. The company also lowered the minimum spec requirements for using Oculus Rift, making a VR-ready system much cheaper.

Check out the video of the entire presentation below.