Microsoft’s Xbox Live Avatars Arrive As Your Customizable Digital Doppelgänger

As with any sector of humanity, gamers are a unique and diverse bunch with different ethnic backgrounds, styles and sense of fashion, shapes, sizes, and so forth. For nearly a decade, Xbox gamers could choose an avatar to represent themselves in the virtual world, albeit with limited selections. That's about to change. Microsoft is pushing out a major update to Xbox Insiders that opens up a whole new level of avatar customization and a bunch of new options.

"Avatars will be a unique representation of your desired style, personality, creativity, and mood as you play on Xbox One. As an Xbox Insider, you’re among the first to get your hands on the new Avatars. With this release, you can get a head start on creating a new Xbox Avatar within the beta Xbox Avatar Editor app," Microsoft stated in a blog post. We’re starting things off with a selection of customizable appearance and closet items in each category. Additional accessories, props, moods, clothing, and appearance categories will be unlocked in the near future, and more content will regularly become available after launch."

For right now, Microsoft is only turning on the Avatar Editior itself, though Xbox dashboard integration will be arriving soon. The new avatar options are built from the ground up to offer an "unprecedented amount of inclusive options," which Microsoft says it plans to grow over time. There is a wide range of body types to choose from, along with gender-neutral clothing. Microsoft also created entirely new categories of times and accessories, including fingernails, makeup, limbs, nose rings, and more.

Gamers who have access to the Avatar Editor will find a whole lot of things to customize and can spend a ton of time creating a personalized representation, and do it on-the-fly. There are over 16 million color options to fine tune skin tone, hair, clothing, and so forth.

"Most closet items also support multiple custom colors, so the number of possible color combinations for a single item can go from trillions all the way up to almost eighty octillion– that’s an eight followed by 28 zeroes!," Microsoft says.

The editor will keep track of any recently used colors in the "my colors" section, so gamers don't have to worry about forgetting which exact hue they used. One the avatar is created, there is a Photobooth feature that allows users to pose and snap a pic of their creation to use on their profile.

Microsoft did not say when the new avatar options will roll out to the public at large, but now that it's being tested on Xbox Insiders, a general release shouldn't be too far behind.