VR can often look like you're playing a video game. But Facebook is promising to bring photo-realistic effects to the technology, including the ability to show lifelike versions of your face.

During Facebook's F8 developer conference, the company previewed what these new digital avatars might look like on the Oculus Rift, and the results were impressive. The avatars didn't look like video game characters at all, but real people.

"This is what they (the Facebook engineers) would look like when they see each other in VR," CTO Mike Schroepfer during today's keynote (full video of his presentation is here.)

When these new digital avatars might arrive isn't clear. But the technology represents a giant leap from the cartoonish avatars Facebook currently offers over its VR-based Spaces app, which lets you communicate with friends in a virtual world.

During the same presentation, Facebook also showed off efforts to not only make avatars more realistic, but environments, too. The company's Oculus VR subsidiary has been working on capturing images of real-life rooms and reconstructing them in 3D.

Facebook demonstrated the technology in another video, noting that it managed to recreate the reflections in the mirrors found in the room. (In the video below, the virual room is on the left.)

"This may sound like a minor detail, but it's getting these countless details right that will make VR believable," said Maria Fernandez Guajardo, a head of product management at Oculus VR.

Although Facebook is best known as a social networking service, it bought Oculus VR in 2014, betting that virtual reality represents the future of digital communications and media.

Facebook's goal is to make VR "indistinguishable from reality," Schroepfer said during his keynote. "We think we can solve this problem in a way no one has seen before."

For now, VR is far from mainstream, in part because most of the best VR headsets must be tethered to a powerful computer. There are standalone efforts, though, including the $199 Oculus Go, which was released on Tuesday.