Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage today at the Oculus Connect developers conference and showed off a taste of the company's mobile VR future. Lone Echo turns you into a robot assistant that can help a mission commander thanks to the use of your hands, made possible by the new Oculus Touch hand sensors. SAN JOSE -- When Oculus Rift first debuted, there were only a few ways to interact with the virtual world inside the headset. You could look at something and then click on a small control stick. This actually happened when I first experienced a VR T-Rex snarling in my face.

First generation virtual reality may have nailed sense of presence, but one major limitation keeps it from feeling truly immersive: Walking. The endless landscapes of the digital world are hampered by the confines of reality -- your playspace is only so big, and if you walk too far in any given direction, you're going to hit a wall. Most games get around this with teleportation mechanics, allowing the player's avatar to jump to far-off locations. Ready at Dawn Studios' Lone Echo took another approach: turn off the gravity, and eliminate the need to walk altogether. Lone Echo casts the player as Jack, an artificially intelligent robot who helps astronauts run and maintain a space station that orbits Saturn. It's the perfect environment for a game trying to sidestep limitations of VR's walking problem: with no gravity, there's no need to walk.