During Microsoft’s E3 press conference today, they unveiled a complete redesign of the Xbox 360 interface.  Gone is the blade system, and in its place are avatars, a community system with eight-way chat and photo sharing (among other things), ‘Primetime’, and the welcome visual refresh.

the new Xbox 360 dashboard

More details to come after the press conference wraps up.

Update:

Now that the media briefing has wrapped up and news has settled down a bit, we’ve gone back through the videos of the press conference and dissected the Xbox 360 fall update part.  With the barrage of awesome new game trailers, really strange fly-swatting, and some down right scary dancing, you may have missed some of the details.  Based on what Microsoft showed off from the new dashboard, it looks like 360 owners will be greeted by a brand new interface this fall.  From the screen shot above you can see the cover-flow-esque view of the contents of your Xbox, and as you navigate from one page to the other the pages sort of slide towards the front of the screen.  It really makes the current blade system look dated, so I’m eagerly looking forward to whenever ‘this fall’ actually is.

As part of the dashboard demonstration, Microsoft also showed off the new Avatars that are now part of your gamercard.  They look way too Mii-ish to me, and I really wish Microsoft would have done something a little more innovative here.  Catching up to everyone else is good and all, but come on, this isn’t a new concept, and they sure acted like it was the greatest thing ever done.  I quote from the avatar demonstration, “Where else besides Xbox Live can you introduce the concept of an avatar, and it immediately becoming a community of 10 million avatars.”  Hmmm… I can’t think of anywhere else. They even went so far as to refer to the new sections of the dashboard as channels!  Seriously though, the ‘Community’ section (I’m sorry, I’ll never call them channels) does have some truly new functionality.

As part of ‘Community’, you can now join a Live party.  The concept here is that all your online friends’ avatars show up in the Community section, and then up to eight people can group together to chat, share photos, play games, and more.  That’s right, finally more than just two people can chat at once through the dashboard.  I’ve been waiting on this one since the 360 launched.  They didn’t get into too many details on everything that will be possible while you’re in a Live party, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Up next was ‘Primetime’, which focused on community based (your Live party and presumably anyone else) gameshows that you can participate in with your avatar.  This looks like it could be a great place for the non-traditional gamers out there.  As an added bonus, there are apparently real prizes for the winners of the show too.  It’s pretty obvious that Microsoft wants to penetrate more of the casual gaming market this holiday season.

And the final part of the fall update was a huge addition to the lackluster video part of Xbox Live.  This fall, anyone with a Netflix account and an Xbox Live subscription will have access to the Netflix library online.  So far, the movies available online through Xbox Live have been slow to update and pretty sad in sheer number of movies; but it looks like this is finally being addressed.  Not only that, but with your Live party you can all watch the same movies together.  Whether or not everyone in the party has to have a valid Netflix account wasn’t mentioned; I’m hoping not, but we’ll have to wait for more details.

Update: Turns out everyone in the Live party will need valid Netflix subscriptions.  Boo!  I fail to see how this is actually ’sharing’ if everyone has it… but oh well.  It’s still nice to see new features.

Overall, I think the redesign will be a huge improvement over the current blade system, with a lot of new features added.  It’s really quite a testament to the amount of functionality a software-only update can bring.

- Image from the IGN.com live video stream of the Microsoft Media Briefing.